Uber offered shares to media barons for political help, leak reveals

Uber courted leading media barons across Europe and India with the aim of using their clout to secure more favourable treatment from governments, leaked documents reveal. It asked existing media investors to lobby on its behalf and offered others prized stakes in the company.

In France, when Uber was facing regulatory obstacles in early 2015, it courted the billionaire owner of the luxury goods corporation LVMH, Bernard Arnault. LVMH is the parent company of the French financial daily Les Echos.

The Times of India group offered a public relations opportunity around the time its deal with Uber was being finalised. The editor-in-chief of its English-language daily the Economic Times, Rahul Joshi, offered Kalanick the podium at the Global Business Summit it was hosting in January 2015.

That media deal came with Uber under intense pressure after one of its drivers raped a 26-year-old woman in Delhi in December 2014, and it was accused of conducting weak background checks on workers. Uber was allowed to resume operating in Delhi in late January 2015, having agreed to do more safety checks.

Rothermere went on to meet Kalanick in January 2015 at a dinner hosted by the German media magnate Hubert Burda in the Residenz, a former royal palace in Munich, the Uber files show.

A spokesperson for Axel Springer said the stake in Uber was in exchange for advertising space in its publications and was too small to merit being announced at the time. Kalanick was just one of many people who spoke at the Die Welt conference. The editorial departments operated completely independently and had featured negative as well as positive coverage of Uber, he added.