A leaked cache of confidential files from ride-sharing company Uber illustrates ethically dubious and potentially illegal tactics it used to fuel its frenetic global expansion beginning nearly a decade ago, a joint media investigation showed Sunday.
Founded in 2009, Uber sought to skirt taxi regulations and offer inexpensive transport via a ride-sharing app. The consortium’s so-called “Uber Files” reveal the extraordinary lengths that the company undertook to establish itself in nearly 30 countries. Lobbyists pressed government officials to drop their investigations, rewrite labor and taxi laws and relax background checks on drivers.
Dubbed the “Uber Files,” the investigation involving dozens of news organizations found that company officials leveraged the sometimes violent backlash from the taxi industry against drivers to garner support and evaded regulatory authorities as it looked to conquer new markets early in its history.
The revelations, which were compiled from 124,000 documents from 2013 to 2017 and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, are the latest blow to a company dogged by controversy as it grew into a disruptive force in local transportation.
Uncensored text and email correspondence between executives are included in the cache, with standouts coming from co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick, who was forced to resign in 2017 after being accused of brutal management techniques and numerous instances of sexual and psychological harassment at the workplace.
The Uber Files
In its eighth collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), The Indian Express spent four months investigating The Uber Files, a cache of 124,000 internal emails, text messages and documents from inside Uber.
They were leaked to the Guardian, and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a number of media organisations including BBC Panorama. They reveal, for the first time, how a $90m-a-year lobbying and public relations effort recruited friendly politicians to help in its campaign to disrupt Europe’s taxi industry.
And how it used stealth technology to bypass regulators; tapped into a sprawling lobbying network; aggressively cut corners as it drove through loopholes in law and regulation.
These records cover 2013-2017, the period when the company, led by its flamboyant and brash co-founder, Travis Kalanick, was steamrolling its cab-hailing service from one world market to another.
While French taxi drivers staged sometimes violent protests in the streets against Uber, Mr Macron – now president – was on first name terms with Uber’s controversial boss Travis Kalanick, and told him he would reform laws in the firm’s favour.
Uber’s ruthless business methods were widely known, but for the first time the files give a unique inside view of the lengths it went to in achieving its goals.
They show how ex-EU digital commissioner Neelie Kroes, one of Brussels’ top officials, was in talks to join Uber before her term ended – and then secretly lobbied for the firm, in potential breach of EU ethics rules.
At the time, Uber was not just one of the world’s fastest-growing companies – it was one of the most controversial, dogged by court cases, allegations of sexual harassment, and data breach scandals.
The Uber File: Macron Role
Emmanuel Macron went to extraordinary lengths to support Uber’s lobbying campaign to help it disrupt France’s closed-shop taxi industry, even telling the tech company he had brokered a secret “deal” with its opponents in the French cabinet.
Leaked files including text message exchanges between Uber executives and Macron reveal how the cab-hailing business identified him as a key ally when he was economy minister and turned to him to help it behind the scenes.
The files suggest pro-business Macron, who was re-elected French president in April, was close enough to Uber’s managers during his two years in the economy ministry from 2014-16 for them not to think twice about contacting him for possible help when their premises were raided by tax and other authorities.
The early enthusiasm Macron had for Uber and what he believed it stood for was unwavering. When he was appointed in August 2014, he was open about his desire to embrace the new digital economy and transform France’s rigid labour market in an effort to stop rising unemployment, particularly among young men from immigrant backgrounds who lacked the necessary qualifications. Uber could serve as an example of the “startup nation” that he desired.
According to Macron, his role is to support “the outsiders, the innovators,” and he wanted Uber to demonstrate to France the potential of the new, deregulated economy.
He would tell Mediapart that prohibiting Uber would have amounted to sending jobless youth from the impoverished banlieues “back there to sell drugs.”
Files show Macron welcomed the company’s input. Before an initial meeting between Uber and Macron, a ministerial aide wrote to its French management asking explicitly for its “regulatory expectations”, as well as the estimated impact of its business on employment and transport costs.
The Uber File: About Rape Case
US-based taxi hiring service pinned blame on the ‘flawed’ Indian system and authorities here for the rape of a woman in Delhi in a Uber cab in 2014.
Allen Penn, Uber’s then-Asia Head, wrote in an email to the team in India on August 23, 2014, just one year after the country’s launch: “Embrace the chaos. It implies that you are engaged in worthwhile activity.
A little more than three months later, on December 5, 2014, an Uber cab driver in New Delhi sexually assaulted a female passenger.
While encouraging the team – “Irrespective of what the competition and entrenched interests say, You and Uber are the ones improving India” – he instructed them on how to keep the authorities at bay.
“We will likely have both local and national issues in almost every city in India for the rest of your tenure at Uber… Don’t talk to the Government or folks close to the Government unless you have specifically discussed with Jordan (a reference to Jordan Condo, Uber’s Head of Public Policy for Asia)… we will generally stall, be unresponsive, and often say no to what they want. This is how we operate and it’s nearly always the best. Early quick meetings set us up for failure. Get comfortable with that approach… don’t let it distract you from your mission to dominate the market,” he wrote.
Due to the New Delhi rape case, Uber was temporarily banned from operating on the city’s roads and was compelled to apply for a licence to run operations through an Indian subsidiary rather than through Uber BV, its international company based in the Netherlands, for the first time ever in a city in the world.
Subsequently, Uber encountered a plethora of regulatory issues with the Reserve Bank of India and governmental agencies like the Service Tax, Consumer Courts, and Income Tax. The same is true today.
Uber blamed the Indian licensing scheme for the crime and blamed Indian authorities. The internal communications showed that Mark McGann, then Uber’s Head of Public Policy for Europe and the Middle East, wrote on December 8, “We’re in crisis talks right now and the media is blazing…The Indian driver was indeed licensed, and the weakness/flaw appears to be in the local licensing scheme,” a report said.
Uber’s services were banned in Delhi following the rape incident in 2014. The services resumed after seven months following legal intervention
False Use of Tech
The investigation also found that Uber worked to evade regulatory probes by leveraging a technological edge, the Post wrote.
The kill switch was also used in Canada, Belgium, India, Romania and Hungary, and at least three times in France.
It described an instance when Kalanick implemented a “kill switch” to remotely cut off access of devices in an Amsterdam office to Uber’s internal systems during a raid by authorities.
“Please hit the kill switch ASAP,” he wrote in an email to an employee. “Access must be shut down in AMS (Amsterdam).”
Kalanick spokesperson Devon Spurgeon said the former chief executive “never authorized any actions or programs that would obstruct justice in any country.”
Asked about the frequent use of the ‘Kill Switch’, Uber’s spokesperson in the US, Jill Hazelbaker, and the company’s spokesperson in New Delhi had an identical response: “Uber does not have a ‘Kill Switch’ designed to thwart regulatory inquiries anywhere in the world and has not since Dara Khosrowshahi became CEO in 2017. On the contrary, authorities regularly make requests for information and we routinely cooperate with those requests. While every company has software in place to remotely protect its corporate devices, such software should never have been used to thwart legitimate regulatory actions.”
Kalanick “did not create, direct or oversee these systems set up by legal and compliance departments and has never been charged in any jurisdiction for obstruction of justice or any related offense,” she said.
Following a raid in Uber’s offices in Paris the same year, de Kievit, Uber legal counsel, was arrested for obstruction of justice by cutting IT access and activating the ‘Kill Switch’.
The Guardian reported Uber developed sophisticated methods like ‘kill switch’ to thwart law enforcement. When an Uber office was raided, executives at the company frantically sent out instructions to IT staff to cut off access to the company’s main data systems, preventing authorities from gathering evidence, the publication reported. The technique was deployed at least 12 times during raids in France, Netherlands, Belgium, India, Hungary and Romania.
