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