The rideshare drivers’ nonprofit that made waves in Minneapolis in their push for higher compensation from Uber and Lyft has been fracturing from within, with disagreements over leadership and finances revealed in a lawsuit detailing accusations of fraud against its leader.
Six drivers are behind the lawsuit, which targets Eid Ali, the public face of the battle that stretched over more than a year from Minneapolis City Hall to the State Capitol.
Four of them are board members of the Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association, who say Ali tried to jettison them from their positions after they attempted to review MULDA’s corporate books. The Minnesota Reformer first reported the lawsuit.
According to the complaint, rideshare drivers Farhan Badel, Mohamed Bulle, Mustafa Abdile, Ahmed Mohamed, Ahmed Igale and Dawit Kassa started organizing with other drivers in the summer of 2022 in a parking area of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport over concerns about their pay, which was lower than the minimum wage prescribed by cities like Minneapolis. That led to the formation of a drivers committee and the selection of Eid Ali, who said he had organized taxi drivers in the past, as leader.
Ali had the Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association incorporated as a nonprofit and started collecting “membership” fees of $200 apiece from drivers. Within a month MULDA had collected more than $60,000 from drivers who wanted to back the organization’s efforts to pass legislation to increase their pay, according to the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs allege Ali later incorporated two other nonprofits, “MULDA-RC” and “MULDA,” without their knowledge, and changed the articles of incorporation of the Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association to say it would have no members, although Ali continued to accept online payments from the public.
The suit claims that Ali’s creation of three different nonprofits based on the increasingly prominent advocacy organization — as well as an associate of Ali’s incorporation of a “MuldaActionFund, P.A.” — confused drivers and made them concerned about how the organization was being run. Those drivers created a competing organization called “Mulda Members.”
The board of Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association named Bulle, Abdile, Mohamed and Kassa as members in December 2023. The plaintiffs felt that their appointments were made as gestures of increasing accountability, according to the suit, but that they were kept in the dark about the nonprofit’s operations.
