Emails reveal how Bolt tried to shape Estonia’s opposition to gig work directive

In October 2023, mobility company Bolt, headquartered in Estonia, offered to draft a letter on behalf of the Estonian government to push back against the platform work directive, addressing a government official who used to work for Bolt.

At the time, European Union legislators were negotiating rules to create new labour arrangements for gig workers, like those on Bolt’s app, a flagship in the sector and one of the largest players on the EU market.

Estonia, a European leader in IT and digital economy, was part of a group of countries, including Germany, France, and Greece, that tried to block the legislation from going through in the Council of the EU until the very last moment — arguing that it risked stifling business innovation.

According to a series of email exchanges and confidential documents secured by the non-profit Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request and obtained by Euractiv, Bolt went to great lengths to ensure Estonia would speak in favour of platforms and fight to weaken the proposed directive.

Bolt went as far as drafting a letter in the name of Estonia to push against a compromise text circulated by the then-Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU. Parts of the interactions were directed at a former Bolt employee who moved on to work as an official at the Estonian Ministry of Economics and Communications.

The email exchanges took place at one of the most crucial periods for the file, when tensions were running high and the Spanish Council Presidency hoped to close the deal by year-end.

Emails between mobility platforms’ public affairs leads and Estonian government officials, including ministers, sent over two years, show how actively Bolt and others fought against the platform work directive.

They do not hint to illegality, but shine a light on platforms’ aggressive lobbying tactics, and the ethically grey area that public officials and stakeholders often operate in.

Raphaël Kergueno, senior policy officer at Transparency International EU, told Euractiv the email exchanges “show once again we urgently need consistent transparency rules within the European Council.”

The Council, he said, is a “black box” when it comes to interactions member states have with lobbyists, even though “transparency rules are paramount to ensuring accountable democratic processes.”

Intense two-year negotiations

The platform work Directive, proposed by the European Commission in December 2021, is the first attempt to regulate the gig economy in the EU.

It seeks to ensure workers benefit from the contractual status that best fits their relationship with digital platforms.

In the roughly two years of negotiations, and until the very last moment, the file faced considerable backlash from several member states, including France, Estonia, and Greece.

At the crux of the disagreements lay creating a new legal presumption of employment which would harmonise reclassification processes through which self-employed platform workers could become full-time employees with accompanying social rights.

Workers could convert to this status if they establish that the platform manages their work, known as a subordination link in labour law.

Platforms raised concerns that the legal presumption would threaten their business model and create a risk of mass reclassification of platform workers from self-employed to full-time employees.

Estonia and several other EU countries also said the file could stifle business innovation and warned against an overcomplex legal presumption of employment.

EU countries eventually adopted a watered-down version of the directive on 11 March 2024, which will be voted on in the European Parliament’s plenary on Wednesday (24 April).

All aboard the Bolt scooter

The email exchanges obtained by Euractiv show how platforms tried to use Estonia – a country sympathetic to the gig platforms’ discourse – to convince other member states to vote against the directive, especially during Spain’s Council presidency.

In an email sent on 26 October 2023, Bolt’s chief lobbyist for Western and Southern Europe, Aurélien Pozzana, contacted Sandra Särav, deputy secretary general for economy and innovation at the Estonian Ministry of Economics and Communications, with an unusual request.

Following up on some meetings with the ministry, Pozzana’s email said, Bolt had drafted a letter addressed to the Spanish presidency that pushed back against the negotiations’ direction.

“[W]e hope the Estonian Government could sign [the letter] and encourage other ‘allied’ member states to [do] so as well, to ask the Spanish Presidency to stick to the agreement adopted in June within the Council,” Pozzana’s email said.

The letter attached to the email was drafted to read as though it had been penned by Estonia, rather than by Bolt.

“We, the ministers of labour of +++ [sic] EU member states, are writing to express reservations about the direction of negotiations on the proposal for Improving Working Conditions in Platform Work,” the draft letter said.

In his email, Pozzana made reference to a previous meeting that “JK” – most likely Bolt’s President Jevgeni Kabanov – held with Estonia’s economy and finance ministers

At the bottom of the draft letter was a list of nine potential member state signatories Bolt imagined could join forces with Estonia, including Austria, Sweden, Greece, and France.

The email and the letter both refer to the Council General Approach, adopted in June 2023, which had set a higher bar for establishing subordination links between platforms and workers relative to the Commission’s initial draft.

This would have likely made fewer workers eligible for reclassification into full-time employees under the directive.

By the time the email was sent to Särav in October, the Spaniards had circulated a new compromise text, which lowered the threshold once again, much to the platforms’ ire.

In an update note sent to Sävar, also seen by Euractiv, Bolt said: “Allied Member States should encourage the Spanish Council Presidency not to seek a new negotiating mandate at the meeting of 27/10 when Member State ambassadors to the EU will meet (COREPER) to discuss the file”.

The ministry confirmed to Euractiv the existence of the email exchange and the draft letter but said Estonia had not followed through with Bolt’s proposal.

Sävar’s responses, as well as any possible subsequent exchange with Bolt, were not made accessible by the ministry, despite Corporate Europe Observatory’s (CEO) demand that “all correspondence including attachments (i.e. any emails, correspondence or telephone call notes) between officials of the Ministry […] and stakeholders related to the EU Platform Workers Directive” be handed over.

The ministry also failed to provide the list of meetings government officials had with platform leads, as per CEO’s FOI request.

Euractiv understands from a source with extensive knowledge of the matter that another letter, similar to the one seen by Euractiv, is likely to have been sent by the Estonian Permanent Representation to the EU to the Spanish authorities later that same year.

Euractiv was not able to confirm the existence of the second letter. Neither the Estonian Permanent Representation nor Pozzana responded to Euractiv’s multiple requests for comment.

Bolt in, Bolt out

Not only did Bolt try to pen a letter on behalf of Estonian authorities: it handled the matter with a government official that was formerly employed by Bolt.

Särav, the deputy secretary general for economy and Innovation, worked at Bolt as a public affairs manager and head of sustainability between 2019 and 2021.

In April 2023, while platform work negotiations were underway, the English-speaking Estonian Public Broadcasting ERR revealed that Särav had failed to list Bolt stock options she owned in her declaration of financial interests, a year after she had joined the ministry.

At the time, she said she “didn’t believe it was necessary to do so” and denied any wrongdoing — all the while acknowledging that Bolt’s CEO Martin Villig was a “friend” she would meet for lunch, though they would “not talk about work matters”.

The ministry, contacted by Euractiv, denied any wrongdoing or impropriety – citing official transparency guidelines which state an official who worked as a lobbyist must not engage with their former employer for a year. Särav took on her deputy secretary general role in July 2022, exactly a year after she had left Bolt.

The ministry also told Euractiv that Särav did not lead on platform work directive negotiations and would forward emails related to the directive to relevant colleagues – though there is no evidence she has done so in their response to the FOI request.

Moreover, other emails obtained by Euractiv show that Särav received at least five updates within one month from another mobility company, Wolt, indicating she was kept in the loop of the negotiations’ state of play.

Asked by Euractiv to comment on Särav’s exchanges with Wolt, or for information on her side of the conversation, which is missing from the obtained emails, the ministry did not respond.

Särav told Euractiv that her job ultimately comes down to listening to business demands and suggestions: “It is obvious that I and my team are first points of contact for any company in Estonia looking for support from the government.”

Defending Bolt’s position in the Council

Bolt’s letter is one of several instances whereby Bolt tried to convince Estonia to support their proposals to water down the directive’s legal presumption mechanism.

In an email to an Estonian government official dated 23 March 2023, Bolt’s head of public policy for the Baltics, Henri Arras, said he would share the company’s position on a new directive’s compromise text circulated by the then-Swedish presidency.

Arras asked government officials to support Bolt’s demands at a Council technical negotiations meeting on 27 March 2023: “Would you please be able to look at these proposals and possibly support these issues being raised on 27 March?” he wrote.

In another email dated 30 January 2023, Arras proactively shared the results of a legal analysis commissioned by Delivery Platform Europe (DPE), a lobby group, to government officials.

Euractiv asked Arras for a comment, but no response came by the time of publication.

According to the emails, ministry officials were also updating platform representatives on how negotiations were progressing. .

In one email dated 22 June 2022, platforms’ public affairs leads were encouraged to share their suggestions.

“If you have any suggestions on the above topics, or would like to share what effects you see in practice when implementing the different solutions, etc., please send them to [xxx] by 15 August,” said the government official’s email.

Bram Vranken, a researcher at the Corporate Europe Observatory, told Euractiv that “these documents show that there was extremely close coordination between the platform companies and the Estonian government to water down social protections for platform workers”.

“Corporate interests should not drive EU decision-making, but that seems exactly what has happened here.”

[Edited by Eliza Gkritsi/Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]

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