Mr. Tsipras spoke of “vindication”, noting that “now a tangle is unraveling and we are beginning to understand many things from what happened in the past period”
The president of SYRIZA PS, Alexis Tsipras, launched a fierce attack on the government and Kyriakos Mitsotakis personally, in a meeting he had with the Bureau of the Attica Taxi Drivers Union, on the occasion of the revelations about its international corruption scandal Uber and the stance that New Democracy had taken as the opposition.
Mr. Tsipras spoke of “vindication”, noting that “now a tangle is unraveling and we are beginning to understand many things from what happened in the past period”, underlining the revelations “that the company used unfair practices, bribed political figures, ministers, journalists , in order to force the change of the institutional framework in Europe to enforce it against motorists”.
“It’s obvious that unfair practices cannot be used all over the world, but in Greece the support was for ideological reasons, I don’t believe so,” noted Mr. Tsipras, who emphasized that this case “does not only concern yesterday but also today and tomorrow”, since as he said “there are thousands of documents, the investigation will run, we don’t know what revelations we will see in front of us”.
At the same time, the President of SYRIZA PS recalled “what we suffered in 2017-2018 when the pressures were unbearable, when we wanted to end the regime of lawlessness and illegality, after we found that these platforms operate here without having a legal and permanent seat in our country, that the money given by customers did not go to Greek bank accounts, that there was no framework of normal labor relations for the people who worked as employees on these platforms.”
He noted that with the efforts of the government at the time, an attempt was made “to put an end to tax evasion, the exploitation of workers, to create a framework for professional drivers”, but as he said “we were faced with terrifying pressures, remember the statements and interventions of the executives of ND who was in the opposition and Mr. Mitsotakis himself, who accused us of not wanting the investments”.
In addition to this, Mr. Tsipras revealed that “twice he went to shake up the evaluation and the program by the IMF, “because apparently not only politicians and journalists but also technocrats were in on the trick. The IMF was pressuring us to accept these illegal practices, we didn’t. We put our feet up and didn’t do it.”
In this context, Mr. Tsipras asked three questions to the government and Mr. Mitsotakis:
1. “Does ND understand that there was a scandal and is reporting it, or was this also a hoax?”
2. “Does he stand by those statements he had made? That we did not support investments in Greece and that the professional motorists who claimed their rights were and are a guild that wants to survive at the expense of the common interest?”
3. “Why doesn’t he activate the platform that forces the companies that operate to declare every race they take? It is the law we made in 2018, which has not been activated for three years now.”
Lymberopoulos: The Uber case emanates dirt and stench
For his part, the president of SATA after thanking the president of SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance for the immediate response to his request for information regarding the revelations about Uber which, as he said, “emanates dirt and stench”.
Th. Lymberopoulos underlined that the entire industry calls for an in-depth investigation because, as he said characteristically, “it is not possible that there have been such interventions by a multinational throughout the world and that there has been nothing here. The prosecutor must intervene. I have filed a lawsuit against Uber and what happened? Nothing”.
Among the questions that must be answered, as Mr. Lymberopoulos said, is why they want to destroy the taxi, what are the benefits of those who interfere and influence politicians at the expense of an industry that never asked for anything, it just wants to work and work with rules public use and not with “uberization” rules.
He claimed that the “uberisation” of taxis and the country’s economy will result in “society impoverished in galley terms, while others make their money abroad”.
Finally, the President of SATA expressed his hope to meet with the other political leaders as well as the Prime Minister, while he complained that the lawyer of a well-known company in the area has been appointed secretary general by the government.
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