PortraitThe Irish lobbyist was, for two years, one of the main public affairs officers of Uber. It was he who sent the “Guardian” the 124,000 documents that make up the “Uber Files”.
After working for years as a man in the shadows and a lobbyist, he chose to become a whistleblower and fully assumes this decision by revealing his identity today. Mark MacGann, 52, former Uber lobbying chief for Western Europe, Africa and the Middle East, is the man who transmitted to the British daily The Guardian the hundreds of thousands of internal Uber messages and documents that make up the “Uber Files”.
“Uber Files”, an international investigation
“Uber Files” is an investigation based on thousands of internal Uber documents sent by an anonymous source to the British daily The Guardianand forwarded to International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and 42 media partners, including The world.
Emails, presentations, meeting minutes… These 124,000 documents, dated from 2013 to 2017, offer a rare dive into the mysteries of a start-up which was then seeking to establish itself in cities around the world despite a regulatory context. unfavorable. They detail how Uber has used, in France as elsewhere, all the tricks of lobbying to try to change the law to its advantage.
The “Uber Files” also reveal how the Californian group, determined to impose itself by a fait accompli and, if necessary, by operating illegally, has implemented practices deliberately playing with the limits of the law, or which may amount to judicial obstruction of the investigations of which he was the subject.
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“Investors and politicians alike were rushing to meet Uber and hear what we were offering” Mark MacGann
This is the first time that such a high-level lobbyist has decided to become a whistleblower. Mr. MacGann, a talkative Irishman who also speaks perfect French, detailed his motivations in an interview with Guardianexplaining that he wanted to repair, at least in part, the damage he had helped to cause. “I was there at the time. I was the one talking to governments, trying to push Uber forward with the media. I was the one saying that the rules had to be changed because the drivers were going to benefit and there would be huge economic opportunities”, he explains. But “It turned out that was not the case. It was clear that we had sold everyone a lie”.
And people thronged to the gate to listen to what ” lying “ : “Uber was the hottest company in the tech world at the time, and beyond. Investors and politicians alike were rushing to meet Uber and hear what we were offering”recalls the former lobbyist, for whom this situation was, professionally, “exhilarating”.
Aggressive internal culture
Mr. MacGann, who was previously a lobbyist in Brussels for the New York Stock Exchange, is not naive enough to think that his mission at Uber was to tell only the truth. But he says he found the company to have a particularly aggressive internal culture. “The motto that was repeated from office to office came from the top of the hierarchy: don’t ask permission, start the service, recruit drivers, promote the service, and very quickly people will realize that Uber is a awesome service. » Regardless, in nearly every city Uber launched in the early 2010s, the service is illegal. “In most of the countries under my responsibility, Uber was not authorized, was not allowed, was not legal”, admits Mr. MacGann. For him, a tipping point occurred in 2015, during the violent taxi protests in France, during which several Uber drivers and their customers were physically attacked.
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