Uber offered shares to media barons for political help, leak reveals
Uber courted leading media barons across Europe and India with the aim of using their clout to secure more favourable treatment from governments, leaked documents reveal. It asked existing media investors to lobby on its behalf and offered others prized stakes in the company.
The tech company’s charm offensive targeted the owners of publications including the UK’s Daily Mail, France’s Les Echos, Italy’s La Repubblica and L’Espresso, Germany’s Die Welt and Bild and the Times of India. The German deal was discussed internally as a way of gaining political “support and influence” in Germany and Brussels, according to the Uber files, a leak of more than 124,000 documents to the Guardian.
In the winter of 2015-16 the company did what it called a “cash plus media for equity” deal with the leading newspaper publisher Axel Springer, the owner of Die Welt and Bild, selling a $5m stake. The arrangement was not made public until 2017. Uber also announced a similar partnership with Bennett, Coleman & Co, the owner of the Times of India group, in early 2015.
The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant's most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, duped police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.
To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the Guardian shared the data with
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