Latest / The Front / Brisbane boots Beam over ‘phantom scooters’ scheme

Transcript

Brisbane boots Beam over ‘phantom scooters’ scheme · The Front

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  Speaker 1: You can listen to the fronts on your smart sneaker
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  Speaker 1: the news from The Australian.
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  Speaker 2: From the Australian, here's what's on the front I'm Kristin Amiot.
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  Speaker 2: It's Monday, September two. Anthony Abernezi's approval ratings have returned
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  Speaker 2: to their lowest level since he became Prime minister. That's
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  Speaker 2: according to new data from Newspoll. But the Opposition leader
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  Speaker 2: our experts analysis of those new numbers right now at
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  Speaker 2: The Australian dot com dot au. Queensland's government DNA laboratory
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  Speaker 2: has kept hundreds of sexual assault victims waiting for forensic
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  Speaker 2: results for more than a year, and it's because the
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  Speaker 2: thousand major crime cases embroiled in a DNA disaster exposed
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  Speaker 2: by The Australian's podcast Shandy Story more than three hundred
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  Speaker 2: thousand dollars. That's how much Brisbane city Council was allegedly
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  Speaker 2: robbed off by the scooter sharing company Beam Mobility last year.
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  Speaker 2: Now the nation's biggest city council is kicking Beam to
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  Speaker 2: the curb and it could have global ramifications for the.
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  Speaker 1: Multimillion dollar company.
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  Speaker 2: That's today's episode Scooters. If you live in a city,
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  Speaker 2: you've probably been impressed or enraged by fleets of purple
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  Speaker 2: electric scooters dumped on street corners, zooming down footpaths.
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  Speaker 1: Love them or hate them, These scooters are his being
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  Speaker 1: Brisbane and so.
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  Speaker 3: A lot of people get random and if not, just
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  Speaker 3: have a little bit.
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  Speaker 2: In some places like Brisbane and Townsville, they're lined up five,
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  Speaker 2: six or seven in a row.
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  Speaker 4: I haven't personally ridden one of these scooters my children have.
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  Speaker 4: I'm probably not as coordinator as I should be in
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  Speaker 4: handling something so fast and nimble.
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  Speaker 2: That's the Australians Queensland Bureau Chief Michael McKenna. He's a
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  Speaker 2: bit of a novice.
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  Speaker 4: But there's no doubt that the Beam Mobility scooters are
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  Speaker 4: very evident. The purple livery is everywhere they share the city.
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  Speaker 4: At the moment with their rival Lime Scooters, beam Mobility
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  Speaker 4: has obviously now lost that contract and now it's up
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  Speaker 4: to the city council to find one of its other
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  Speaker 4: rivals to provide the other half of that cup of scooters.
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  Speaker 2: Yep, Beam has been booted out of Brisie and it's
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  Speaker 2: all because of a bit of creative accounting allegedly led
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  Speaker 2: by its Yale educated founders.
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  Speaker 4: So over the past month, the Australian newspaper has been
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  Speaker 4: investigating be Mobility, which is the largest provider of e
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  Speaker 4: scooters in Australia. That investigation was triggered by a complaint
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  Speaker 4: by a whistleblower who later furnished US with reams of
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  Speaker 4: internal correspondence both on slack and internal emails. The allegations
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  Speaker 4: that were put to us was that the two founders,
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  Speaker 4: Alan Jang and deb Yango per day and the number
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  Speaker 4: of executives had cooked up a project whereby they were
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  Speaker 4: deliberately exceeding the limit that was given by each of
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  Speaker 4: the cities as part of the contract for the license
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  Speaker 4: to put these scooters into those cities.
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  Speaker 2: When be Mobility was awarded a license to operate in Brisbane,
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  Speaker 2: it was allowed to have eighteen hundred scooters on the
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  Speaker 2: ground at any one time. It agreed to pay a
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  Speaker 2: registration fee of six hundred and fifty dollars per scooter
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  Speaker 2: per year. US Brisbane City Council would take a cut
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  Speaker 2: of the fee paid by riders every time they hopped
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  Speaker 2: on a Beam scooter. That's more or less how it
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  Speaker 2: operates in thirty six other cities around Australia and New Zealand,
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  Speaker 2: including Sydney, Perth, Darwin, adelaide Cans, Townsville and Hobart. The
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  Speaker 2: number of scooters as well as their functionality, is monitored
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  Speaker 2: by a third party watchdog called ride Report. It partially
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  Speaker 2: relies on data supplied by Beam and other ride sharing
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  Speaker 2: companies like Lyme to kip tabs on the number of
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  Speaker 2: scooters and bikes zooming around our cities. Ride Report then
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  Speaker 2: sends that data back to its clients, that's the councils
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  Speaker 2: where Beam has a license to operate. But if a
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  Speaker 2: scooter status is marked as unknown, Ride Report doesn't count it,
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  Speaker 2: and that's where things get interesting.
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  Speaker 4: What we understand is that Beam were deliberately misleading ride
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  Speaker 4: Report and pretending that the rideable scooters were unavailable or
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  Speaker 4: unknown for reasons such as low battery or damage, and
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  Speaker 4: that meant that those scooters that were actually on the
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  Speaker 4: street didn't appear in the monitoring technology. The consequence of
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  Speaker 4: that is that one it subverted the safety limits in
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  Speaker 4: keeping the number of scooters on the streets to a minimum,
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  Speaker 4: and also it allowed Beam to generate cash from the
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  Speaker 4: rides from everyday users while not having to pay the
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  Speaker 4: fees that it was supposed to pay to the Risen
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  Speaker 4: City Council. In the correspondence that we've seen, Beam executives
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  Speaker 4: boasted of potentially earning at least one hundred and fifty
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  Speaker 4: thousand dollars a month from its Australian and New Zealand
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  Speaker 4: operations through the Running Hot Project.
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  Speaker 2: A tranch of documents and screenshots shared with Michael and
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  Speaker 2: Senior reporter Sarah Elks by a whistleblower. So Beam was
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  Speaker 2: allegedly fudging the numbers in Canberra, Townsville, Auckland and Wellington,
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  Speaker 2: but Brisbane was the biggest money maker, with an extra
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  Speaker 2: five hundred phantom.
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  Speaker 1: Scooters deployed every day since last July.
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  Speaker 2: It means Brisbane City Council has been robbed of more
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  Speaker 2: than three hundred thousand dollars and it's not happy about it.
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  Speaker 4: At the same time that we were given the documents
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  Speaker 4: by the whistleblower. We also later learned that the whistleblower
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  Speaker 4: had given similar not all of the documents to city
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  Speaker 4: councils in Australia and New Zealand. They began to run
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  Speaker 4: their own investigations and internal audits. The Brisbane City Council
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  Speaker 4: has contacted me and shown me the findings of their
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  Speaker 4: preliminary audit. The Brisbane City Council are now seeking some
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  Speaker 4: of the extra documents that we have to use in
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  Speaker 4: negotiations to recoup that lost revenues from the company. If
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  Speaker 4: they don't cooperate with those negotiations or the city councils unsatisfied,
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  Speaker 4: they've told me that they intend to take legal action.
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  Speaker 4: They're also on Monday going to send a report to
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  Speaker 4: the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and also potentially make
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  Speaker 4: a referral to the police. One of the more extraordinary
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  Speaker 4: things that you can see in the documents that we've
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  Speaker 4: been given by the whistleblower is the amount of people
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  Speaker 4: that are allegedly involved.
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  Speaker 3: The slack chat, which was titled war Room, had.
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  Speaker 4: As many as twenty managers, legal counsel and the founders
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  Speaker 4: involved in essentially running two sets of books, one set
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  Speaker 4: of books for the regulators and the city councils that
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  Speaker 4: they were providing the services, and another set of books
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  Speaker 4: which were talking about the real amount of scooters that
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  Speaker 4: were being deployed into these cities and the real amount
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  Speaker 4: of money that they were making in revenues from users.
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  Speaker 4: It was quite an extraordinary thing to have so many
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  Speaker 4: involved in alleged conspiracy, and what usually happens when there's
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  Speaker 4: so many involved in the conspiracy, it started to leak.
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  Speaker 2: Beam Mobility's chief executive Alan Jung says there's a perfectly
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  Speaker 2: innocent explanation for the discrepancy. In a statement to The Australian,
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  Speaker 2: he said the company had marked certain scooters as unknown,
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  Speaker 2: then deployed extras to fill the gap left by unwriteable vehicles.
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  Speaker 2: He acknowledged that approach meant that sometimes they exceeded the
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  Speaker 2: vehicle allocation stipulated by their license, and he said he
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  Speaker 2: was deeply apologetic for the mix up, but he rejected
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  Speaker 2: the suggestion it was a scheme to deprive councils of revenue,
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  Speaker 2: and said Beam will revise its processes to ensure it
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  Speaker 2: doesn't happen again.
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  Speaker 1: That may be too little, too late.
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  Speaker 4: Last week, the Auckland City Council canceled their contract with
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  Speaker 4: Beam Mobility because of similar allegations and have referred the
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  Speaker 4: matter to New Zealand Police for investigation. The Wellington City
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  Speaker 4: Council has also canceled their contract and there are investigations
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  Speaker 4: that we know of in Touncil Darwin, Hobart in Australia.
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  Speaker 3: As well as several other cities.
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  Speaker 1: It's a bungle that could cost Beam darly.
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  Speaker 4: We've been contacted by the South Korean government through information
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  Speaker 4: and we know that Beam already operates in about sixty
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  Speaker 4: cities globally and their market share has been increasing, really
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  Speaker 4: booming out of site in Turkey, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand,
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  Speaker 4: South Korea and obviously Australia and New Zealand.
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  Speaker 3: This is a red hot tech company.
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  Speaker 4: In the past twelve months, it's raised over one hundred
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  Speaker 4: million US dollars from investors across the world. Its profit
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  Speaker 4: had jumped thirty six percent in the last calendar year,
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  Speaker 4: with predictions of expanding into another ten countries in the
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  Speaker 4: next eighteen months. The reputational damage to this company is significant.
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  Speaker 4: They operate on the basis of providing services to cities
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  Speaker 4: and paying fees. And at the moment we've got a
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  Speaker 4: series of investigations both by counsels and least one police
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  Speaker 4: service possibly more, which are looking into them misleading regulators
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  Speaker 4: and the city councils they work for. So the significance
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  Speaker 4: and the potential for this company in terms of its
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  Speaker 4: damage is huge.
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  Speaker 1: Coming up.
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  Speaker 2: This isn't Alan Jong's first brush with investigators. Subscribers to
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: The Australian get first access to these kind of in
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  Speaker 2: depth investigations. Plus there's breaking news alerts, newsletters and lively
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  Speaker 2: commentary twenty four to seven. Check us out at the
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  Speaker 2: Australian dot com dot au and we'll be back after
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  Speaker 2: this break. B Mobility isn't Alan Jung's first tech venture,
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  Speaker 2: and now is this his first encounter with government investigators.
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  Speaker 2: Here's Michael McKenna.
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  Speaker 3: That's right.
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  Speaker 4: Alan Jang, one of the two co founders and Yale
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  Speaker 4: University graduates, was previously a senior manager with Uber, initially
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  Speaker 4: in twenty fourteen. He helped lead the expansion of Uber
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  Speaker 4: into China and Malaysia before taking the reins as the
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  Speaker 4: country manager for Indonesia in twenty seventeen. It emerged that
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  Speaker 4: Uber was under investigation by the US Department of Justice
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  Speaker 4: for alleged bribery. That US Department of Justice investigation was
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  Speaker 4: into alleged payments by Uber employees alleged bribery payments to
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  Speaker 4: Indonesian police officers. At the time, mister Jiang reportedly was
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  Speaker 4: suspended and then left the company. The Department of Justice
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  Speaker 4: investigation was discontinued in twenty twenty.
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  Speaker 3: Mister Jiang says.
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  Speaker 4: That he was not the focus of the investigation and
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  Speaker 4: has provided a letter from his lawyers that says that
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  Speaker 4: the Department of Justice a request to speak with him
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  Speaker 4: or obtain any information from him. But there's no doubt
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  Speaker 4: that when he left in twenty seventeen, Uber, the company
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  Speaker 4: he led in Indonesia, was under investigation by the US
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  Speaker 4: Department of Justice for foreign bribery allegations.
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  Speaker 2: Michael McKenna is the Australian's Queensland Bureau Chief. He collaborated
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  Speaker 2: on this investigation with senior reporter Sarah Elks. You can
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  Speaker 2: read their full investigation as well as the latest updates
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  Speaker 2: right now at the Australian dot Com dot Au