Uber tried to pin the blame on “flawed” background checks of drivers in India and deployed a strategy to stonewall queries from government authorities after a woman was raped during a cab ride in Delhi in 2014, leaked documents are said to show.
The claims were published by the Indian Express newspaper on Monday after it analysed a cache of internal company documents initially obtained by The Guardian that were shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism.
Dubbed “The Uber Files”, the trove of documents include text and email exchanges between executives from 2013 to 2017.
While the December 2014 rape case had caused a widespread outrage against Uber in India and led to the suspension of its services for seven months, in an August 2014 email titled “Dealing with regulator issues”, the company’s former Asia head Allen Penn informed the team of a strategy to stall queries from the Indian authorities.
In the mail, he told the team to not “talk to the government or folks close to the government” unless specifically discussed with the public policy head for Asia and “generally stall, be unresponsive and often say no” to government queries.
Four months later, Uber was in the line of fire for failing to perform adequate background checks in India after it emerged that the driver, Shiv Kumar Yadav, was facing charges in four other criminal cases at the time he sexually assaulted the female passenger.
The accused was subsequently convicted of rape and...
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