New Delhi: Uber staff in its San Francisco headquarters panicked after a woman passenger was raped in a cab by its driver in Delhi on 5 December, 2014, a tranch of leaked documents has revealed.
The company immediately took the line that it was the “flawed” Indian system of background checks (BCGs) of drivers that led to the accused Shiv Kumar Yadav committing a second sexual harassment case.
The Indian Express, which received these leaked documents, said in a report that an unmistakable effort was made to pitch the blame on local authorities.
Internal communications showed that Mark McGann, then Uber’s Head of Public Policy for Europe and the Middle East, wrote on 8 December: “We’re in crisis talks right now and the media is blazing…The Indian driver was indeed licenced, and the weakness/flaw appears to be in the local licensing scheme.’’
MacGann sent another email to his team: “We are in the process of platinum-plating our background checks in other regions, given the issue in India (where the official State system is at fault, not Uber).”
The rape resulted in a “worst-case scenario” for Uber in Delhi. The government banned its services, and it took seven months and an intervention from the Delhi High Court for Uber cabs to be back on the roads.
The Guardian sifted through more than 124,000 confidential documents leaked to it and found how the tech giant “flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion”.
The documents bring to fore the company’s ethically questionable practices that made it Silicon Valley’s most-famous product.
The leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to force the cab-hailing service into cities around the world, even if that meant breaching laws and taxi regulations, the report said.
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