You can’t just take and make your Uber

According to Roem.ru , the Belgorod region court ruled that the district court’s ban on the activities of Infoservice LLC, acting as the Maxim taxi order service and providing taxi services through the mobile application, was legal. According to the court’s website , the plaintiff was the Office of Public Roads and Transport of the Belgorod Region.

The claim was based on the lack of permits for carrying out transportation activities, as well as a violation of the “rules for the carriage of passengers and baggage by road, urban electric land transport, and the carriage of passengers and baggage by taxi.” According to the rules, this activity is carried out on the basis of a public charter (carriage) contract concluded by the charterer (client) directly with the driver of a passenger taxi or by accepting the charterer's order for execution by the charterer. The order is accepted by any means of communication .

The order of the Maxim service

The organization placed in the media advertisements for recruitment to the dispatching service and an invitation to cooperate for drivers with personal cars. Drivers who wished to cooperate with a taxi service had special software installed on their mobile phonesthrough which the dispatch service distributed applications between machines. The dispatch service by phone took citizens' orders for taxi services, informed them of the cost of the order, then transmitted information about applications through a mobile application to drivers. The driver, having selected the application, informed the operator about it through the same mobile application, after which the operator informed the customer about the make and number of the car that will fulfill the application. Services of dispatchers in the amount of 10% of the cost of each application were paid by transferring funds to a current account through the terminal.

According to the plaintiff, the service was not entitled to provide taxi services; neither the organization nor the drivers involved in the service had the necessary documents for passenger transportation, which, according to the plaintiff, posed a real threat to the safety of passengers.

Meanwhile, Infoservice refused to admit the allegations and stated in court that the company was providing information services to users, rather than providing taxi services. But as it turned out in court, the rules of transportation suggest that the order is accepted by any means of communication . Thus, the company, accepting applications for the carriage of passengers and distributing them among drivers, actually organizes and organizes passenger transportation by passenger taxi.

However, neither the company nor the drivers directly involved in passenger transportation have permits to carry out this activity. The company does not have information about the health status of drivers, the technical condition of the vehicles used, and does not guarantee the safety of transportation and order fulfillment.

In this connection, the claim was fully satisfied.