Revenu Quebec agents had been investigating Uber for weeks, including covert visits to the company’s Montreal offices and following its Quebec general manager to work one day. They suspected that the car transport service incorrectly stated that it owed no provincial sales tax and helped some drivers dodge that tax and the federal GST.
On May 13, 2015, they obtained a search warrant, and the next day they raided the company’s facilities. But at 10:40 a.m., at two Uber offices in Montreal, investigators observed that the company’s laptops, smartphones, and tablets suddenly restarted at the same time.
Worried that the device data could be manipulated from a distance, officers turned them off. They confiscated 14 computers, 74 telephones and some documents, according to court records obtained by CBC / Radio-Canada.
Uber CEO of Quebec at the time, Jean-Nicolas Guillemette, told investigators he had contacted engineers at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco who had encrypted all the data remotely. .
What happened in Montreal was far from an isolated incident, but a tactic used by Uber to try to frustrate the authorities in the cities where it was trying to establish its business, according to documents found in Uber’s archives, a major leak. of internal records of the concert economy company.
Filtered records show how the company launched as a luxury travel service in San Francisco in 2010 tried to overcome legal and political obstacles through complex lobbying choreography, cultivating influential allies, dodging authorities and ignoring the rules. when they seemed uncomfortable.
While Quebec tax authorities executed a search warrant at Uber’s offices in Old Montreal on May 14, 2015, computers and electronic devices were remotely encrypted and restarted by headquarters engineers. Uber headquarters in San Francisco. (Radio-Canada)
The leaked files contain 124,000 records, including 83,000 emails, iMessages and Whatsapp exchanges among Uber’s top executives, as well as notes, presentations and invoices. The records, which span 2013 to 2017, shed light on a period when Uber was aggressively expanding and operating illegally ignoring taxi regulations in many cities around the world, including Canada.
Files were filtered The guardian and shared with the Washington base International Consortium of Investigative Journalistsa nonprofit newsroom and a network of journalists among its media partners include CBC / Radio-Canada, the Toronto Star, the Washington Post, the BBC and Le Monde.
In a statement to the ICIJ, Uber spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker acknowledged “mistakes” and “mistakes” that culminated five years ago in “one of the most infamous accounts in the history of American companies,” but that the company had changed. their internships since 2017.
frustrating the authorities
The leaked files reveal that a “stop switch”, as it was called internally, and encryption software were also deployed in France, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania and India, while government authorities stormed company offices to enforce taxes, transportation and other laws.
The “death switch” would remotely cut off access to the company’s servers located in San Francisco and prevent government authorities from obtaining files from the company while local staff appeared to still collaborate with investigators.
According to a leaked email in 2015 from an Uber legal director in Western Europe, the company was especially concerned that authorities could access its list of drivers, making it “much easier than prosecutors, the regulators and the police terrorize our supply ”and enforce it. “If we hand over the list of drivers, our goose may be cooked,” he added.
In one of the first uses of this type of stop switch that appears in the leak, when the French competition and consumer agency attacked the company’s Paris offices in November 2014, the European legal director Uber at the time sent an email titled “Kill Access to Paris Now.” “at 3:14 p.m. local time. Thirteen minutes later, an engineering director replied, ‘Done now.’
Internal text messages leaked during a raid by French tax authorities at Uber’s Paris office in 2015. Employees are asked to look surprised when their computers can no longer connect to a server while investigators search for evidence. (Uber / The Guardian / ICIJ files)
During a July 2015 raid by the French tax agency, Mark MacGann, Uber’s chief lobbyist in Europe, advised Thibauld Simphal, then head of Uber France, that employees be fools when it comes to activates the switch, according to filtered text messages.
“Try a few laptops, get confused when you can’t access, say your computer is there [San Francisco] and deeply asleep. ”
The French coach replied, “Oh yeah, we’ve used this game book so many times by now, the hardest part is continuing to be amazed!”
MacGann told the Guardian he was just following orders. “On all occasions when I personally participated in‘ death switch ’activities, I acted on the express orders of my management in San Francisco,” he said.
Simphal, now head of global sustainability at Uber, said all of his interactions with public authorities were conducted in good faith.
During an April 2015 raid on his Amsterdam offices, Uber’s manager for Western Europe sent an email to a company engineer: “Kill the switch [Amsterdam] as soon as possible please. ”
Uber co-founder and then CEO Travis Kalanick was connected to the email chain. Seven minutes later, he wrote, “Please press the kill switch as soon as possible … Access must be closed at [Amsterdam]. ”
In a statement sent to the ICIJ, a Kalanick spokesman said the former CEO never authorized any action or program that would obstruct justice in any country.
He said Uber, like other companies operating overseas, used tools to protect the intellectual property and privacy of its customers and guarantee due process rights in the event of an out-of-court raid.
Kalanick’s spokesman also said the protocols do not remove any data and that all decisions about their use were reviewed and approved by Uber’s legal and regulatory departments.
After the Montreal attack, Uber went to court to dispute the validity of search warrants obtained by Revenu Québec.
A The judge of the Superior Court of Quebec ruled that the orders were valid. He also mentioned that remote shutdown and encryption of electronic devices “carries all the hallmarks of an attempt to obstruct justice” and that a judge could reasonably conclude that the company sought to hide evidence of illegal conduct in the tax authorities.
It is unclear what happened next with the investigation. A Revenu Quebec spokesman told CBC / Radio-Canada that the agency cannot comment on current or past investigations.
Finally, Uber reached an agreement with Revenu Québec under which the company would charge the GST and QST on behalf of its drivers and remit the amounts to the tax authorities.
Uber is listed today as a public company worth US $ 42 billion, roughly the same as CIBC.
He says he operates in more than 10,000 cities and more than 70 countries. Its name has become synonymous with car transport applications in the many markets where it dominates, and has branched out into food delivery.
But at the bird level, leaked records underscore that there was nothing inevitable about the company’s meteoric rise since its launch in San Francisco in 2010.
Uber’s deliberate strategy to establish itself would also lead to many headaches. In a leaked presentation in 2014, the company characterized these issues as “the shit pyramid,” made up of layers of direct litigation, administrative procedures, regulatory investigations, and driver lawsuits.
A slide from a leaked presentation in 2014 titled Europe: The Best Defense is Attack, at Uber’s European headquarters in Amsterdam. (Uber / The Guardian / ICIJ files)
Uber sought political allies to help it overcome these obstacles and keep moving forward.
“Back Canal Route to Montreal”
When the UberX service was launched in Montreal in 2014, Mayor Denis Coderre immediately he stated it publicly “Of course it’s illegal.”
Behind the scenes, Uber’s head of policy development sent an internal email saying, “This was expected and fully known, but we’re working with the province and city of Quebec as a post-channel route. around Montreal “.
When Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union, called on the Ontario government to intervene after the launch of UberX in Ottawa in October 2014, the same policy manager wrote: “We have met and continue to meeting with the relevant provincial cabinet ministers to avoid this problem …. We meet with the relevant provincial ministers of the provinces of Canada. ”
The following month, Toronto City Council decided to file a lawsuit against Uber for allegedly violating its taxi and limousine rules.
On the same day, elected mayor John Tory issued a press release criticizing the city’s decisionsaying, “Uber is a technology that the time has come and it has come to stay.”
A leaked internal note suggests Uber’s policy team had “worked to make sure [the] extremely positive response “from Tory.
Tory’s office did not answer our questions.
Elected Mayor John Tory speaks with reporters outside Toronto City Hall in late October 2014. (Chris Young / The Canadian Press)
On October 4, 2014, John Baird, the federal foreign minister in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet, complained on Twitter i Facebook of waiting 75 minutes for a taxi to Ottawa. He publicly asked the city to allow Uber, which had begun operating illegally in the capital.
A few days later, Uber’s political team claimed to have “assured the Canadian Foreign Minister as a public endorsement,” according to a leaked internal note.
Baird spokesman Michael Ceci said the former minister “does not recall that Uber Canada staff contacted him.”
Uber also tried to influence elected officials and Alberta public opinion.
In Edmonton, when UberX launched in December 2014, a …