Angry taxi drivers set off a smoke bomb outside the Yandex.Taxi’s Moscow office Tuesday and distributed leaflets in a protest against the company’s rising commission fees.
Yandex.Taxi introduced higher commission rates of up to 30 percent in March, leading hundreds of Moscow taxi drivers to launch a boycott of the service.
On Tuesday, video footage showed a smoke bomb going off near the entrance to the office building and police and ambulance vehicles arriving at the scene.
“Yandex.Taxi are bloodsuckers! Taxi drivers aren’t sheep!” reads a leaflet plastered on the office's wall.
The smoke was put out and police were investigating the incident, the service’s spokesman Vladimir Isayev told the Tjournal new website.
Yandex.Taxi merged with Uber last year in a service called NewCo, accounting for roughly 35 million monthly trips and a monthly revenue of $131 million in Russia and its neighbors.
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