Uber Is In Trouble Again; This Time It’s Banned In An Entire Country

by SharonKurheg

On the heels of losing its license to operate in one of its largest markets late last year due to safety concerns, Uber is in the news again. This time it’s even worse; it’s pulling out of an entire country due to its legal problems there.

Uber said late last week that it will halt operations in Colombia due to a lawsuit that said they were breaking local transport laws.

To be in compliance with a December ruling by the country’s Superintendency for Industry and Commerce, the rideshare company’s last day of operations in Colombia will be January 31.

The lawsuit stemmed from local taxi companies that said the app was illegally diverting customers from the country’s traditional yellow taxi. They also claimed that Uber drivers were providing public transportation without proper licensing.

In a related political move, The Washington Post reports that “While the lawsuit was being reviewed by Colombia’s Superintendency for Commerce, taxi drivers’ unions lobbied the government of President Iván Duque to stop Uber and similar apps from operating in Colombia and promised they would not join a large wave of anti-government protests that began at the end of November and undermined support for Colombia’s conservative president.”

hmmm…???

This is, by far, not the first time Uber has been kicked out of an entire country. In the past it’s has to stop services, either temporarily or permanently, in Bulgaria, Denmark, Italy, Germany, Hungary and Taiwan, as well as dozens of cities or territories around the world.

Uber is, of course, appealing.

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary

1 comment

Billy Bob January 14, 2020 - 4:04 pm

Do you know how difficult it is to get rich the legal way? Do you really have any idea what sorts of barriers are set up, especially in less-than-modern (third-world) places?

Go ahead and try.

Say you want to buy some cheap land and then build a strip mall of sorts on it, so that others you know can open stores such as restaurants, maybe a small grocer, and similar things, so that you can import items and then sell them and services to the locals.

Immediately you run into roadblocks — not just ‘regulations’ like what you may be thinking but actual roadblocks where large chunks of information you need are simply not available. You may need to knock down existing structures and/or build from scratch. You need info about permits, labor, reliable suppliers, contractors, etc. You know all this stuff in your home country but here? No way! Assign an egghead employee to look it all up? Good luck with that too. He’ll walk on you.

So, you find a family member of a willing politician. You do this by becoming familiar with the local ‘chamber of commerce’ or whatever passes for it. Those places are filled with the people you need to know. Then, when you’ve got your man, you enrich him in cash and proceed to import absolutely everything you need, including your own laborers and materials if you can, and all of your worries about permits, materials, visas, and all that noise just evaporates. Keep in touch, however, with your point man, and know his friends and even family too. You never really know.

If all goes as planned, such a venture can make you rich. Your tenants don’t get to set up shop for free! This is exactly how it likely went down when you travel to, say, Ecuador and find a cluster of, for instance, Vietnamese shops and restaurants in relatively close proximity to each other.

My point? You can’t just barge into a country without spreading the love around, period.

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