Who are the leaders involved in the Uber Files?

Emmanuel Macron

Among the most notorious personalities in The Guardian’s investigation is the now president of France, Emmanuel Macron, who in 2015 was Minister of the Economy and was a key player in softening the protests of taxi drivers in several French cities.

Macron was in contact with Mark MacGann, who was a lobbyist for the mobility company at the time. After meetings and several messages, the mobility service managed to have the Thévenoud Law on its side, with which the French government gave Uber a free pass to operate.

Joe Biden

Then-Vice President of the United States Joe Biden, an Uber supporter at the time, whom Travis Kalanick met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, causing him to mention the Uber project at said meeting.

The revelation of the Uber Files around the current president of the United States was a meeting where he let him know that the app would create thousands of jobs, however the precariousness of these types of jobs is one of the objectives that Biden is currently working on in his management.

In total, the investigation reveals more than 100 meetings between Uber executives and public officials between 2014 and 2016, including 12 with representatives of the European Commission that have not been publicly disclosed.

Close to Vladimir Putin

Hoping to expand Uber’s business in Russia, Travis Kalanick chatted with various guests from Russian politics where they discussed big data, artificial intelligence, and other tech stuff.

“God love the Russians, where business and politics are so…comfortable,” Mark MacGann emailed two company executives before dinner.

The Uber Files show that some executives identified politically connected Russian billionaires and courted their favor through appeals from former Russian government officials close to Vladimir Putin, yet Uber’s efforts to win favor and a long future in Russia were unsuccessful.

Mauricio Macri

The leak of these files also points to Mauricio Macri, who in 2016 met at the Davos Forum in order to establish negotiations with the Argentine government.

“We thought that the arrival of Macri was going to generate a context that was more open to trade, more pro-market, and that that would allow us to skip over the problems with the unions and the taxis. We had orders from the CEO to move forward as necessary because he considered that Buenos Aires was the only big city in the world where Uber did not operate. They included it along with Paris, Milan and others”, told the Argentine team of ICIJ, a source that closely followed how Uber operated during those years.