My name is Mark MacGann. I'm a former senior executive at Uber
and I'm here as a whistleblower.
I'm the one who revealed what's become known as the Uber files.
I'd worked in highly stressful environments before.
Uber was was very different, it was very intense,
threats, violence, death threats on social media and it's only when you come off that
kind of hamster wheel and you take a step back that you realise how crazy it all was.
As a top lobbyist for Uber, Mark MacGann's job was to make friends in high places.
His mission paved the way for Uber's global domination even in cities where its service was illegal.
Mark is now coming forward to identify himself as the source of the Uber files,
a leak of more than 120,000 confidential documents to the Guardian.
The data reveals how Uber broke the law and evaded police.
How it used Emmanuel Macron in France.
Courted oligarchs in Putin's Russia and held secret meetings with UK cabinet ministers.
This is the first time Mark has spoken publicly about what he
witnessed and why he leaked the files.
So what exactly was it that you were hired to do at Uber?
So I was hired by Uber to lead a team of people to develop and implement our strategy to lobby
governments across Europe, across Africa, across the Middle East so that we could enter the market
and grow despite in most cases the rules not allowing uber to operate.
Do you think you and other senior executives at Uber were aware at the time that it was openly flouting the law in
cities and countries in which there were licensed taxi regulations?
Well, in most of the the countries,
under my jurisdiction, Uber was not allowed, was not authorised, was not legal.
So is it fair then to say in simple terms the strategy was to knowingly break the law and then change the law?
The mantra that people repeated from one office to another was the mantra from the top, so don't ask
for permission, just launch.
Hustle, enlist drivers, go out, do the marketing and quickly people will
wake up and see what a great thing Uber is.
When you're meeting with presidents, prime ministers,
chancellors, city mayors ... how difficult was it for you to get those meetings for Uber?
It was ... I think unprecedented in my career to have such easy access to senior members of government,
heads of government, heads of state.
It was intoxicating and I think Uber was at the time
in the tech world, perhaps in the broader business world, the hottest ticket in town
and to a certain extent both on the investors side and also on the political side, people are almost
falling over themselves in order to meet with Uber and to hear what we had to offer.
One of the things we keep seeing, as we've been combing through this data, we found lots of examples of you
and other uber executives meeting with UK cabinet ministers but these meetings were never declared.
Like, the public would have no reason to know that they'd taken place. Why was that?
Well, perhaps these were just a series of administrative oversights or perhaps it was preferable to keep
some things quiet, I don't know, you'd have to ask the politicians.
What do you think the answer is?
Everyone has friends and people were accepting requests from their friends
and people reciprocating and it was no one's interest for that to come to the fore, for that
to be made public.
So these are basically secret meetings?
These are the cosy networks that have
existed for so long but still manage to change shape but still exist, access to power is not
something that is democratised.
The impression that Uber was getting a free ride from governments
sparked a furious backlash in cities across the world, including in Paris in 2015.
Uber's former chief executive Travis Kalanick responded to strikes by taxi drivers by ordering
a counter protest.
When company executives warned it could result in attacks on uber drivers,
Kalanick replied:
When Travis said violence guarantees success, what did you think he meant by that?
I think he meant that the only way to get governments to change the rules and legalise Uber
and allow Uber to grow, as Uber wished, would be to keep the fight to keep the controversy burning and
if that meant Uber drivers going on strike, Uber drivers doing a demo in the streets, Uber drivers
blocking Barcelona, blocking Berlin, blocking Paris, then that was the way to go.
Isn't that dangerous?
Of course it's dangerous, it's also in a way very selfish because he was not the guy on
the street who has been threatened, who has been attacked who was beaten, being beaten up,
in some cases shot.
Uber's aggressive tactics were not just endangering the lives of drivers.
As the public face of Uber in Europe, MacGann became a target for taxi drivers
who were angry at their loss of livelihoods.
In their eyes, he was an international criminal.
I started getting insults on Twitter, I started getting shouted at airports, train stations
to the extent that taxi drivers were following me around, they were recording where I lived,
they were banging on the door, they were posting pictures online of me with friends,
with the kids of my friends and I started to get death threats on Twitter, so Uber
said, OK, we need to protect you so they forced me to have bodyguards.
Anytime I left my home which was all the time since I was traveling all the time.
In Rome, after meeting the Italian prime minister's advisor, MacGann and his colleague were blocked in their limo.
We got into a car and we were blocked by an angry mob of taxi protesters and really treating us as
if we were the enemy.
This is something I'd never encountered and the anger and hatred that I
witnessed firsthand, I don't hold it against those people who are doing it.
Here's a company that was willing to break all the rules and use its money and its power to impact,
to destroy their livelihoods, so they needed somebody to
be angry at, they needed somebody to shout at, they needed somebody to intimidate, somebody to threaten.
I became that person.
Do you hold Uber responsible for the threats you were facing, for the hostile
environment that you were working in?
I hold Uber responsible for the fact that the company
didn't change the way it behaved.
Its response to violence against one of its senior executives
was to give the guy bodyguards.
There was no change in behavior, no change in tactics, no change in tone,
it was, keep the fight, keep the fire burning.
Could you not have done more at the time you were working at Uber to complain about some of these practices internally?
This was not a culture where you could actually stand up and question the company's decisions or
the company's strategy or the company's practices, so ultimately I realised that I was having no impact,
that I was wasting my time at the company and that feeling, at that point in my career,
combined with the fact that I was worried not just for my own safety but the safety of my family,
my friends, you know, I resigned.
How would you respond to the suggestion that you're
leaking this material out of vengeance against the company?
I think people need to look at
the facts that I'm helping to expose.
Certainly I have had my grievances with Uber in the past,
what I'm doing isn't easy, but I believe it's the right thing.
Do you feel partly
responsible and culpable for the lives that you see drivers now living?
Yes, I do and I am
partly responsible and that's my motivation for doing what I'm doing in being a whistleblower,
it's obviously it's not an easy thing to do but because I was there, I was there at that time,
I was the one talking to governments, I was the one pushing this with the media, I was the one
telling people that they should change the rules because drivers were going to benefit and people
were going to get so much economic opportunity that when that turned out not to be the case,
we had actually sold people a lie.
How can you have a clear conscience if you don't stand up and own
your contribution to how people are being treated today?
So is this for you about making amends?
It's about making amends, it's about doing the right thing.
Look, I own what I did but
if it turns out that what I was trying to persuade governments, ministers, prime ministers, presidents
and drivers turned out to be horribly, horribly wrong and untrue,
then it's incumbent upon me to go back and say, I think we made a mistake and I think to the
extent that people want me to help, I want to play a role in trying to correct that mistake.