Uber to Leave Colombia in February

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – “Bye… maybe see you later”. With this message on its local Twitter account, Uber announced that it will cease operating in Colombia as of February 1st.

The transport platform made its decision official after authorities in the Andean country ordered the immediate suspension of its service by resolving a dispute between the US multinational and a company linked to a local taxi company. The message is paired with an illustration of a white vehicle leaving the country’s map and the sentence “your Uber is leaving Colombia”.

“In compliance with the surprising ruling of the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce (SIC) on December 20th, as of midnight on February 1st, 2020, Uber will cease to operate in Colombia,” the “first country on the continent to shut down its technology,” the company said in a statement issued in Bogotá.

In the ruling, the SIC states that Uber, in constant confrontation with the taxi drivers’ union during its six years in Colombia, “violates the rules that regulate the market, generates a significant advantage and diversion of clients”.

The company said in the statement that it believes the decision violates due process as well as constitutional rights in Colombia, which is why it termed it “arbitrary”. The ruling against Uber for unfair competition and irregular operation of the individual public transport service, which was appealed by the company, came after Cotech SA, a provider of communication technologies to a Colombian taxi company, sued Uber Technologies, based in the United States, its headquarters in Colombia and its subsidiary in the Netherlands.

Colombian regulations contain voids, as Uber complained some time ago. Its operation as a digital App is allowed by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies, but the provision of transport service is deemed illegal.

Despite its exit, the company “is employing all legal resources to defend the right of two million users to choose how they travel around the cities and the opportunity of 88,000 registered App drivers to generate additional earnings to support their families,” according to the statement.

The day before, in a letter sent to President Iván Duque, an advocate of digital ventures and creative industries, Uber announced its intention to sue the Colombian government.

The US multinational claims that by suspending its service, Colombia had violated the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.