Uber France Leaders Arrested For Running Illegal Taxi Company

An anonymous reader writes: Two Uber executives were arrested by French authorities for running an illegal taxi company and concealing illegal documents. This is not the first time Uber has run into trouble in France. Recently, taxi drivers started a nation-wide protest, blocking access to Roissy airport and the nation's interior minister issued a ban on UberPop. A statement from an Uber spokesperson to TechCrunch reads: "Our CEO for France and General Manager for Western Europe were invited to a police hearing this afternoon; following this interview, they were taken into custody. We are always available to answer all the questions on our service, and available to the authorities to solve any problem that could come up. Talks are in progress. In the meantime, we keep working in order to make sure that both our customers and drivers are safe following last week’s turmoils."

Comments

Does Uber need executives in France?

[EllisDees]

It's not like they need to have a physical presence for their app to work there.

Re:Does Uber need executives in France?

[Uberbah]

Unions had their place. It's in history now, just like the confederate flag. Unions need to die, they do nothing any longer other than make a few wallets fat (the few running the unions), a TON of people lazy (nearly all union workers), and they disrupt commerce and blah blah blah blah blah

Unions will be needed as long as greedy executives try to exploit labor. Any more concern trolling?

Re:Does Uber need executives in France?

[Jesrad]

France has a heavily unionized workforce

Nope. Norway or Italy have heavily unionized workforces, whereas France has the least-unionized workforce (7.7%) in Europe save for Estonia (6.8%).

However, France has some of the richest, most politically influential unions, by a huge margin. To put it simply, unions in France are like parallel political parties, with their own occult sources of funding, high-ranking members inflitrated in every institution, and legal priviledges that protect their position.

But french taxis V.S. Uber is an entirely different, though related, issue.

To make light of the sorry state of Uber in France, you only need to know a few things:
- just a few months ago, Agnès Saal was mediatically ousted from her position as head of the INA for allegedly squandering taxpayers' money on... taxi rides (40 000 euros' worth)
- then a couple weeks ago, we learned that the amount squandered was actually an order of magnitude larger than previously stated - there was simply noway to spend that much on taxis
- also notice that Jean-Jacques Augier, the previous CEO of G7 taxis, the biggest taxi company in France, was the financing director of François Hollande's presidential campaign in 2012
- G7 taxis' current CEO is a close friend of Hollande's Parti Socialiste, and was involved in François Mitterrand's own campaigns too

The intimidation campaign that is raging on against Uber in France is simply how the politicians currently in power are defending some of their illegal sources of funding. The seemingly "out of proportion" violence of this campaign is simply a reminder that, in France, you just don't ask about political parties' or unions' money unless you're ready to die (just like Robert Boulin, Pierre Bérégovoy and judge Pierre Michel died).

Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

If taxi drivers have to buy licenses and following certain regulations, shouldn't Uber do the same or are they already?

Re:Not surprised

[Rei]

Uber drivers are subsidized by everybody else. Taxi drivers have to pay high insurance rates because the act of driving a long distance every day for a ton of strangers is a job that inherently leads to a much higher statistical rate of payouts. If they're driving as a taxi on regular car insurance, it's you that's paying the bill for their swindle of the insurance system.

Re:Not surprised

[mysidia]

No... protectionlist laws, like requiring a permit and then limiting the number of outstanding permits to a small fraction of those who want to be in the business, for the sole purpose of restricting supply to be less than what the public needs.

Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[MouseR]

In Quebec, it costs upwards of 200,000$ CDN to have a taxi license.

Drivers spent their entire life's saving enough to buy their own license while they lease another one's. It's their only retirement plan: lease a license they earned to buy.

No wonder they're pissed.

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[pecosdave]

It's their own fucking faults. They lobby to make sure this is the system that's in place to prevent competition from companies like Uber. They got the laws they paid for, it's the people who bought the first wave of licenses/medallions whatever that made bank, now everyone else has to deal with it.

An upstart breaking that system is exactly what real business needs.

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[MoaDweeb]

New Zealand liberalised its taxi system about 25+ years ago. The Gov't allowed anyone to setup a taxi company who had the appropriate car licence endorsement, log books and passed a vetting process for its drivers. etc.

Uber have shown up and decided that they do not have to have vetted drivers, log books etc. 'cos they are Uber!
The Police are investigating.

The barriers for entering the NZ market are quite low but even then Uber do not think they should apply to them.

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

>Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.
Shit happens!

>need to compensate who bought the medallions
Nope! My shares went down in the last crash, noone compensated me!

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[Rockoon]

Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.

..and I bought stock in oil reserves with the understanding that I was buying into a limited monopoly. Then Saudi Arabia started dumping oil on the market. Should the government make me whole again, too?

It seems that you are the victim of a common misconception: That the State is the one selling the medallions that cost so much. Wrong, ignorant fuck.

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[PopeRatzo]

Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.

Maybe it should be clarified here that when you see someone claim that it's not the government charging $200,000 for a taxi medallion, that's just the going price on the secondary market. You know, good old capitalism, where people are bidding up the price of a necessarily limited commodity.

The taxi authority looks at population, traffic flow and transportation needs and comes up with a number of taxis that they think should be on the street. Every year, they add new medallions into the system, usually with a lottery. The idea is not so much to protect the cab drivers (cities don't care about cab drivers. If they did, they wouldn't make the minor traffic fines, like your cab being 10 inches over the line of a designated taxi waiting zone, as much as $500 (which practically wipes out the cab driver's week), but to keep the number of taxis from getting so crazy that you have cabs clogging up city centers, fighting for fares.

Another think medallions are used for is to ensure that someone in an underserved part of the city can get a cab. In my city, certain medallions are required for certain times to initiate or terminate a certain percentage of fares in certain parts of the city.

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[chihowa]

WTF have your shares got to do with your desire to deliberately trash the life savings of millions of taxi drivers in the western world?. They entered into a contract with the government...

Typically, taxi medallions aren't sold by the government anymore. They're typically sold by their previous holders and the high prices reflect their scarcity and perceived value. The market decides this value (even when they're auctioned off by the state), so there isn't any guarantee that they'll maintain that value. Any contracts that exist say nothing about limiting the supply or compensating medallion-holders for any speculative prices they paid. Buying a medallion for $800k is just as speculative as buying an $800k house or $800k worth of stock. There are no government guarantees that they will maintain value.

tl;dr... The economics of the taxi medallion situation are extremely similar to shares in a company. The "contracts" that you're referring to don't exist (at least in the form that you image).

Uber has demonstrated contempt for the law

[rahvin112]

Regardless of whether the laws as written are correct (I would argue that the very existence of a "medallion" that costs more than the filing fee is evidence of collusion between the taxi authority and the taxi's) Uber has shown direct contempt for the rule of law. Their CEO's frequently ignore court orders, not only that but they frequently do the exact opposite of what a court has ordered. In Korea the authorities were forced to start fining drivers record amounts, in Germany the authorities had to threaten to seize cars and fines in excess of $25K. None of this should be necessary as Uber should have shut down their platform in the area when the courts ruled against the legality of their service. If they didn't like the ruling they should have complied while challenging the ruling.

I've said all along the only way to get Uber to comply with the law is stop arresting drivers and start arresting executives for facilitating breaking the law. I'm happy to see the French are finally going to follow through at least partly, I doubt targeting these executives will do the trick the Uber corporate executives will simply let them burn, though the seizure of communications may give them the evidence they need to really get the law breaking to stop, that is to issue InterPOL red notices (warrants) for the CEO and heads of Uber corporate. I firmly believe that Uber acts in total disregard of the law because of their CEO and that the only way to get it to stop is directly go after that CEO. Once he's looking at a jail term I suspect Uber will suddenly become a law abiding business.

IMO Uber acts as a corrupt organization with contempt of the law and should be targeted under RICO statutes.

Uber is illegal in France

[HuguesT]

Uber operates outside the bounds of the law in France. This is well documented. There are two sets of law that they do not obey. The first is one regulating car drivers that are not taxis. It is legal in France to operate a car service to drive people from A to B but you need to abide by some restrictions. The car cannot be hailed, only booked. The driver must have some qualification, etc. Uber does not abide by these laws. The second set of law protects the consumer. In particular, data must be viewable and deletable by the consumer, and they cannot be retained indefinitely. Again Uber does not follow the law.

Recently the french equivalent to state department pointed out to Uber that they needed to change some things, so what did they do? They opened service in 5 new cities with no change. This was seen as provocation, and so obviously the top executives were brought in for questioning. The french cannot state on the one hand that something is illegal and on the other let it happen. They had to act.

Now maybe the law needs to change, this is an important debate. In the meantime in a law-based country the law needs to be upheld.

Re:Uber this!

[BlueStrat]

France can always be counted on to do things in the least logical way possible.

In which alternate universe is arresting the people running an illegal business the "least logical way possible"?

The fact that it's illegal for a private person to accept payment for a car ride principally to protect politically-connected businesses practicing an outdated/obsolete business model is both corrupt and illogical. It's protectionist crony-capitalism. Rather than logically correcting such a corrupt system, they doubled down on it. Just because a government declares something "illegal" does not mean it is morally and/or ethically wrong, or a detriment to society and/or the economy.

Strat