Moscow's Transport Department will seek to ban taxi app Uber from the city unless the company signs an agreement with the authorities, department head Maxim Liksutov said in an interview with the Govorit Moskva radio station on Wednesday.
The department has given Uber until the end of the month to sign an agreement that obliges the company to employ only legally registered taxi drivers and to share data on the travel routes of passengers.
“Unfortunately, federal legislation doesn't clearly regulate the work of online taxi services. We must sign an additional agreement with the companies,” Liksutov told Govorit Moskva.
“I hope that Uber, an international company that tends to operate within the law, will sign such agreement with us,” he added.
The agreement has already been signed by major taxi online services including Gett and Yandex.Taxi, the RBC news website reported.
According to the department head, Uber was ready to conclude the agreement by the end of last year, but then asked that it be postponed until February and then requested an additional ten days.
Yevgenia Shipova, Uber's Russia spokeswoman, told RBC on Tuesday that the delay is linked to the scale of the company.
“Uber is a big company and sometimes the inner procedures on the approval of important documents takes more time that we would like,” she was quoted by RBC as saying.
Uber currently operates in seven Russian cities and is planning to expand into ten new cities by the end of the year, according to RBC.
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