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