Thousands of leaked files exposed how the transportation giant Uber lobbied some of the world’s top politicians and how the company acted to avoid being sued.
The data details the extensive help Uber has received from leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron and former European Union (EU) Commissioner Neelie Kroes.
They also show how the company’s former president personally ordered the use of a “kill switch” to prevent the police from accessing his computers.
After the leak, Uber said its “past behavior was not in line with current values” and that it is a “different company” today.
The Uber Archives is a collection of more than 124,000 records — including 83,000 emails and 1,000 other files involving communications from 2013 to 2017. media, including the BBC and its investigative program Panorama.
The leak reveals in an unprecedented way how a $90 million-a-year lobbying and public relations efforts have managed to rally support from politicians to help in their campaign to harm Europe’s taxi industry.
As French taxi drivers staged sometimes violent street protests against Uber, Macron — who was part of the government at the time and is now president — was in close proximity to controversial Uber co-founder and former chairman Travis Kalanick, calling him by his first name and promising that he would reform national laws in favor of the company.
Uber’s ruthless business methods are widely known, but the archives provide unprecedented insight into its efforts to achieve its goals.
The documents show how former EU digital commissioner Neelie Kroes, a top Brussels official, was in talks for a position at Uber before her term ended — and then secretly lobbied for the company, potentially violating the company’s ethics rules. HUH.
At the time, Uber wasn’t just one of the fastest growing companies in the world — it was also one of the most controversial, surrounded by lawsuits, sexual harassment allegations and data breach scandals.
Uber’s shareholders forced Travis Kalanick out of the company in 2017. Uber says his replacement, Dara Khosrowshahi, was “charged with transforming every aspect of how Uber operates” and “installed the stringent controls and compliance necessary to operate as a public company”.
Macron’s ‘spectacular’ help
Paris was the first European city to receive Uber’s service, which encountered strong resistance from the taxi industry, culminating in violent street protests.
In August 2014, an ambitious ex-banker named Emmanuel Macron had just been named Minister of Economy. He saw Uber as a source of growth and new jobs — and he was eager to help the company establish itself.
In October of that year, Macron met with Kalanick and other executives and lobbyists, marking the beginning of a long — but opaque — campaign as a defender of the company’s controversial interests within the government.
Uber lobbyist Mark MacGann described the meeting as “spectacular. I’ve never seen it,” the files reveal. “Let’s Dance [juntos] coming soon.”
“Emmanuel” and “Travis” soon went on a first-name basis and met at least four times, the documents show – in Paris and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Only the Davos meeting was publicly known.
At one point, Uber wrote to Macron saying it was “extremely grateful”. “The openness and welcome we received is unusual in government-industry relations.”
French taxi drivers were furious with the launch of UberPop in 2014 – a service that allowed unlicensed drivers to offer rides at much lower prices.
Justice and Parliament barred the initiative, but Uber kept the service in operation while it appealed.
Macron didn’t believe there was a future for UberPop, but he agreed to work with the company to reform France’s laws governing its other services.
“Uber will provide an outline of a regulatory framework for ridesharing. We will connect our respective teams to start working on a viable proposal that could become the formal legal framework in France,” an email from Travis Kalanick to Macron reads. .
On June 25, 2015, the violence of the protests escalated. And the following week, Macron texted Kalanick, apparently offering to help.
“[Eu] I will gather everyone next week to prepare the reform and correct the law.”
On the same day, Uber announced the suspension of UberPop in France. Months later, Macron signed a decree relaxing the requirements for licensing Uber drivers.
The extent of the French president’s relationship with the controversial global company – which at the time was in violation of French law – had not been revealed until now.
A spokesperson for Macron responded to the leak: “His roles naturally led him to meet and interact with many companies involved in the sharp change that took place during these years in the service sector, which needed to be facilitated by unblocking administrative and regulatory hurdles.”
Uber said the “suspension of UberPop was by no means followed by more favorable regulations”, and a new law that came into effect in 2018 resulted in the adoption of “stricter regulations” in France that “were not at all beneficial to Uber.”
Regulator turned lobbyist
The files also reveal how Uber’s relationship with one of Europe’s top officials, European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes, was older and deeper than publicly known. She may have violated the rules governing the conduct of commissioners.
The data reveals that Kroes was in talks to join Uber’s advisory board even before stepping down in November 2014.
EU rules say commissioners must respect an 18-month professional quarantine period – during which time, new jobs must be approved by the commission.
When she was Commissioner, Kroes oversaw EU competition and digital policy and became famous for going after so-called “big tech” (big tech companies), playing a leading role in imposing huge fines on Microsoft and Intel.
Of all the companies she could have worked for after leaving the EU, Uber was an especially controversial choice.
In his home country of the Netherlands, the ride-sharing service UberPop has also brought legal and political problems.
Uber drivers were arrested in October 2014, and in December of that year, a judge in The Hague banned UberPop, imposing fines of up to €100,000. In March 2015, Uber’s Amsterdam office was raided by Dutch police.
Emails say Kroes called ministers and other government officials to persuade them to change positions during the operation.
During another operation a week later, Kroes got back in touch with a Dutch minister and, according to one of the leaked emails, “harassed” the head of the Dutch civil service.
An internal Uber email advised the team not to discuss the informal relationship with the flight attendant externally: “Your reputation and our ability to negotiate solutions in the Netherlands and elsewhere would suffer from any casual manifestation inside or outside the office.”
The files show that the company wanted Kroes to relay messages to the office of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
In October 2015, an email read: “We’re going to bridge the gap between Neelie and the PM’s chief of staff, to get the most out of it, ‘giving’ them the notion of a ‘victory'”.
Kroes wrote to the European Commission’s Ad Hoc Ethics Committee requesting permission to join Uber’s advisory board before the 18-month occupational quarantine period and made an appeal to the commission’s chairman, Jean-Claude Juncker.
The request was denied, but documents show that Kroes continued to help the company informally until his appointment was announced, shortly after the quarantine ended.
This reinforces that Kroes “clearly violated” the rules, says Alberto Alemanno, professor of European Union law at HEC Paris in France.
“She was doing something she wasn’t allowed to do,” he told BBC Panorama. “Because, if she hadn’t asked permission, she could still argue that there’s a gray, undefined area. But now there’s no such argument.”
In reviewing what has been released about Kroes’ relationship with Uber, Alemanno said: “It makes me feel that our system is probably not effective because this situation should have been avoided.”
Kroes denies having had any “formal or informal role at Uber” before May 2016, when his former job’s quarantine expired.
She said that, as EU Commissioner, she interacted with a number of tech companies, “always motivated by what I believe would benefit the public interest.”
During the quarantine period, the Dutch government appointed the former commissioner as a special representative for startups (tech startups) — a position that involved interactions with a “wide range of business, governmental and non-governmental entities” with the aim of promoting a “business-friendly and business-friendly ecosystem in the Netherlands,” she said.
After the leaks, a spokesman for the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs said that “Uber was not considered a startup in 2015”.
Uber says Kroes left its advisory board in 2018 and has since introduced new guidelines “strengthening oversight” of “lobbying and external engagements with policymakers” in Europe.
‘Press the “kill switch” immediately’
If the police decide to take action against the company, Uber had a plan B to defend itself: the “kill switch”, an off button, which made it impossible to access the company’s computers.
This would restrict access to sensitive company data – such as driver lists – that the company believes would stunt its growth.
The files confirm reports about the “kill switch” and reveal that Kalanick himself activated the system at least once.
“Please press the power off button ASAP [o mais rápido possÃvel]. Access needs to be taken down in AMS [Amsterdã]”, says an email that came from your account.
The “kill switch” was also used in Canada, Belgium, India, Romania and Hungary, and at least three times in France.
After the leak, Uber said there had been “no ‘kill switch’ designed to disrupt regulatory investigations anywhere in the world” since the new chief executive took over in 2017.
A spokesperson for Kalanick said that he has never authorized actions or programs that obstruct justice in any country and that any accusation that he has done so is entirely false. He said Uber “used tools that protect its customers’ intellectual property and privacy” and that “these failsafe protocols do not erase any data or information, and have been approved by Uber’s legal and regulatory departments.”
Uber Files is a leak of 124,000 records, including emails and texts exposing conversations and meetings between Uber executives and government officials as the company worked to expand its business. The files were leaked to the Guardian newspaper, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washington and media partners in 29 countries, including the BBC’s Panorama programme.
Text originally published here.
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