Online taxi platform Uber paid a total of €450,000 in fines last year for breaking taxi regulations with its Uberpop service.

Junior infrastructure minister Sharon Dijksma told MPs in a briefing that transport inspectors carried out four specific campaigns focused on Uber’s Uberpop app last year. Uberpop is illegal in the Netherlands because it uses private cars and under Dutch law, taxi drivers have to be licenced.

In November, Uber announced it was withdrawing the controversial Uberpop service in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, a legal hearing against the company is still pending, Dijksma told MPs.

The company withdrew the service because Uberpop is a ‘hindrance to the constructive dialogue about modernising the existing taxi rules’, Uber Nederland director Niek van Leeuwen said in a blog post.

In total, transport inspectors carried out 15 targeted campaigns against non-licenced drivers last year, Dijksma said. These resulted in 34 drivers being cautioned, of whom three worked for Uber.