London taxi drivers prepare plan for £1 billion Uber lawsuit
London taxi drivers are reportedly drawing up a plan to sue Uber for over £1 billion (Dh4.82bn), according to Sky News, a couple of weeks after the San Francisco company was granted a temporary license to operate in Britain’s capital.
The association is expected to argue that the 25,000 black cab drivers in London taxi companies have lost an average of £10,000 a year for at least five years because of being undercut by Uber. It has accused the company of failing to abide by the rules applied to other taxi and minicab drivers.
In a statement, the LTDA said: “We’ve been approached by a number of members to help them explore whether there would be grounds for a potential class action on behalf of all taxi drivers against Uber.
“We are in the very early stages of obtaining legal advice from leading law firm Mishcon de Reya on whether this is a possibility.
Unions have also criticized the firm for how it treats drivers. In 2016 the London Employment Tribunal ruled that Uber drivers were workers, not self-employed contractors as the firm had claimed.
As such they are entitled to basic rights such as the National Living Wage. The departure of London taxi was another loss for Uber. The ride-hailing company has been without a chief financial officer for years and has seen frequent defections from the department. Mr Adarkar’s previous boss, Uber’s acting CFO Gautam Gupta, left about a year ago for the real-estate start-up OpenDoor Labs as the company searched for a permanent CFO.
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