Uber CEO Indicted!
Uber has made many friends over the past couple years but unfortunately, they have made many enemies, too. Governments around the world are pushing back on Uber but none harder than South Korea. It seems their prosecutor’s office issued an indictment for CEO Travis Kalanick, charging him and the unit based in Korea with violating transportation services laws.
It almost shouldn’t be surprising that the country wants to charge Uber with a crime. After all, this is the same nation that issued an arrest warrant for former Korean Air executive Heather Cho because of her, uh, nutty behavior on a flight.
Not sure how this will play out for Uber in South Korea but we can be sure that CEO Kalanick most likely has no plans to visit the country.
An indictment with up to $18k in fines possible is more or less meaningless. Pure posturing.
In fact, it’s such weak sauce that it amounts to implicit permission to continue operating — it shows responsiveness to entrenched interests (taxis), that politicians are DOING SOMETHING, but that something is so light that the message to Uber is there’s a near-zero cost to continuing to do business, travel on!
Oh, and there won’t be any extradition. 😉