Uber sued by pension funds for allegedly concealing sexual assault numbers, misleading shareholders

Topline

Three public pension funds this week sued Uber's chief executive and board members, alleging company directors collected millions of dollars in safety-linked bonuses while knowingly concealing from shareholders and the public the true scale of sexual assault on the platform—allegedly more than 400,000 incidents from 2017 to 2022.

Key Facts

• Three pension funds—Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension & Relief Fund, Boynton Beach General Employees' Pension Plan and Steamfitters Local 449 Pension Fund—filed the suit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

• The complaint names CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, board chair Ronald Sugar and eight other current directors as defendants, alongside the company's president and two former chief financial officers.

• The suit alleges Uber's executives knowingly concealed the scale of the sexual misconduct problem with its drivers, publicly disclosing only 12,522 accounts of “serious sexual assault” in the six-year window, in which 400,181 total reports of sexual assault or misconduct were actually made.

• The suit also claims the company built tools and wrote policies that could have prevented dangerous incidents—including installing cameras in cars, training drivers, implementing more stringent background checks and using a machine-learning model to forecast which driver-passenger pairings might result in a sexual assault—but either nixed them or delayed their implementation.

Forbes has reached out to Uber for comment.

This is a developing story and will be updated.