Brazil's competition authority has ruled that taxi drivers did not bring sham litigation and coordinate threats against Uber drivers in an attempt to drive them out of the Market.

Maurício Oscar Bandeira Maia, a commissioner of the Administrative Council for Economic Defence, said yesterday that Uber had failed to present evidence to show that threats against its drivers were part of a coordinated attempt to exclude the ride-sharing platform from the Brazilian taxi market. He also said that the taxi drivers' litigation against the company was not groundless, and therefore did not violate Brazil's competition law.

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Leonardo Maniglia Duarte, a partner at Veirano Advogados, said the ultimate failure of the taxi drivers' lawsuits against Uber did not factor into CADE's assessment, as the competition authority determined the initial filing of the claims "was not groundless".

"Brazil's competition law has a very broad definition for anticompetitive conduct, so any act that harms competition falls under its jurisdiction," he said. "It considered whether the taxi drivers' actions have some grounds of whether they intended to harm its competitor, and ultimately concluded that the drivers did have some basis to believe that Uber could not operate in Brazil because it was unregulated at the time they filed the suits."

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