[More than 124,000 confidential documents leaked to the Guardian,
Files expose attempts to lobby Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz and George
Osborne, Emmanuel Macron secretly aided Uber lobbying in France, texts
reveal, Company used ‘kill switch’ during raids to stop police
seeing data, Former Uber CEO told executives ‘violence guarantees
success’]
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UBER BROKE LAWS, DUPED POLICE AND SECRETLY LOBBIED GOVERNMENTS, LEAK
REVEALS  
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Harry Davies, Simon Goodley, Felicity Lawrence, Paul Lewis and Lisa
O'Carroll
July 10, 2022
The Guardian
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_ More than 124,000 confidential documents leaked to the Guardian,
Files expose attempts to lobby Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz and George
Osborne, Emmanuel Macron secretly aided Uber lobbying in France, texts
reveal, Company used ‘kill switch’ during raids to stop police
seeing data, Former Uber CEO told executives ‘violence guarantees
success’ _

, Guardian Design

 

A leaked trove of confidential files has revealed the inside story of
how the tech giant Uber
[[link removed]] flouted laws, duped
police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied
governments during its aggressive global expansion.

The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents
– known as the Uber files – lays bare the ethically questionable
practices that fuelled the company’s transformation into one of
Silicon Valley’s most famous exports.

The leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its
co-founder Travis Kalanick
[[link removed]], who tried to
force the cab-hailing service into cities around the world, even if
that meant breaching laws and taxi regulations.

During the fierce global backlash, the data shows how Uber tried to
shore up support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents,
billionaires, oligarchs and media barons.

French taxi drivers protesting against private hire services such as
Uber. Photograph: Olivier Coret/Rex/Shutterstock

Leaked messages suggest Uber executives were at the same time under no
illusions about the company’s law-breaking, with one executive
joking they had become “pirates” and another conceding: “We’re
just fucking illegal.”

The cache of files, which span 2013 to 2017, includes more than 83,000
emails, iMessages and WhatsApp messages, including often frank and
unvarnished communications between Kalanick and his top team of
executives.

Q&A

What are the Uber files?

The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000
documents that were leaked to the Guardian. The data consist of
emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley
giant's most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations,
notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.

The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the
period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They
reveal how the company broke the law, duped police and regulators,
exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments
across the world.

To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the
Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries via the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The
investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.

In a statement
[[link removed]],
Uber said: "We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour
that is clearly not in line with our present values. Instead, we ask
the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years
and what we will do in the years to come."

In one exchange, Kalanick dismissed concerns from other executives
that sending Uber drivers to a protest in France
[[link removed]] put them at risk of
violence from angry opponents in the taxi industry. “I think it’s
worth it,” he shot back. “Violence guarantee[s] success.”

In a statement
[[link removed]],
Kalanick’s spokesperson said he “never suggested that Uber should
take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety” and any
suggestion he was involved in such activity would be completely false.

The leak also contains texts between Kalanick and Emmanuel Macron
[[link removed]], who secretly
helped the company in France when he was economy minister, allowing
Uber frequent and direct access to him and his staff.

Macron, the French president, appears to have gone to extraordinary
lengths to help Uber, even telling the company he had brokered a
secret “deal” with its opponents in the French cabinet.

Privately, Uber executives expressed barely disguised disdain for
other elected officials who were who were less receptive to the
company’s business model.

After the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who was mayor of Hamburg at
the time, pushed back against Uber lobbyists and insisted on paying
drivers a minimum wage, an executive told colleagues he was “a real
comedian”.

When the then US vice-president, Joe Biden, a supporter of Uber at the
time, was late to a meeting with the company at the World Economic
Forum at Davos, Kalanick texted a colleague: “I’ve had my people
let him know that every minute late he is, is one less minute he will
have with me.”

After meeting Kalanick, Biden appears to have amended his prepared
speech at Davos to refer to a CEO whose company would give millions of
workers “freedom to work as many hours as they wish, manage their
own lives as they wish”.

The Guardian led a global investigation into the leaked Uber files,
sharing the data with media organisations around the world via
the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
[[link removed]] (ICIJ).
More than 180 journalists at 40 media outlets including Le Monde,
Washington Post and the BBC will in the coming days publish a series
of investigative reports about the tech giant.

In a statement responding to the leak
[[link removed]],
Uber admitted to “mistakes and missteps”, but said it had been
transformed since 2017 under the leadership of its current chief
executive, Dara Khosrowshahi.

“We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that is
clearly not in line with our present values,” it said. “Instead,
we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five
years and what we will do in the years to come.”

Kalanick’s spokesperson said Uber’s expansion initiatives were
“led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the
world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full
approval of Uber’s robust legal, policy and compliance groups”.

‘EMBRACE THE CHAOS’

The leaked documents pull back the curtains on the methods Uber used
to lay the foundations for its empire. One of the world’s largest
work platforms, Uber is now a $43bn (£36bn) company, making
approximately 19m journeys a day.

The files cover Uber’s operations across 40 countries during a
period in which the company became a global behemoth, bulldozing its
cab-hailing service into many of the cities in which it still operates
today.

An Uber car in Moscow. Photograph: Fifg/Alamy

From Moscow to Johannesburg, bankrolled with unprecedented venture
capital funding, Uber heavily subsidised journeys, seducing drivers
and passengers on to the app with incentives and pricing models that
would not be sustainable.

Uber undercut established taxi and cab markets and put pressure on
governments to rewrite laws to help pave the way for an app-based,
gig-economy model of work that has since proliferated across the
world.

In a bid to quell the fierce backlash against the company and win
changes to taxi and labour laws, Uber planned to spend an
extraordinary $90m in 2016 on lobbying and public relations, one
document suggests.

Its strategy often involved going over the heads of city mayors and
transport authorities and straight to the seat of power.

In addition to meeting Biden at Davos, Uber executives met
face-to-face with Macron, the Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, the
Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and George Osborne, the
UK’s chancellor at the time. A note from the meeting portrayed
Osborne as a “strong advocate”.

In a statement, Osborne said it was the explicit policy of the
government at the time to meet with global tech firms and “persuade
them to invest in Britain, and create jobs here”.

While the Davos sitdown with Osborne was declared, the data reveals
that six UK Tory cabinet ministers had meetings with Uber that were
not disclosed. It is unclear if the meetings should have been
declared, exposing confusion around how UK lobbying rules are applied.

Taxis block Whitehall during a protest against a decision to grant
Uber a licence to operate in London in 2016. Photograph: Andy
Rain/EPA

The documents indicate Uber was adept at finding unofficial routes to
power, applying influence through friends or intermediaries, or
seeking out encounters with politicians at which aides and officials
were not present.

It enlisted the backing of powerful figures in places such as Russia,
Italy and Germany by offering them prized financial stakes in the
startup and turning them into “strategic investors”.

And in a bid to shape policy debates, it paid prominent academics
hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce research that supported
the company’s claims about the benefits of its economic model.

Despite a well-financed and dogged lobbying operation, Uber’s
efforts had mixed results. In some places Uber succeeded in persuading
governments to rewrite laws, with lasting effects. But elsewhere, the
company found itself blocked by entrenched taxi industries, outgunned
by local cab-hailing rivals or opposed by leftwing politicians who
simply refused to budge.

A demonstrator holds a flare during a Paris protest against
Uber. Photograph: François Mori/AP

When faced with opposition, Uber sought to turn it to its advantage,
seizing upon it to fuel the narrative its technology was disrupting
antiquated transport systems, and urging governments to reform their
laws.

As Uber launched across India, Kalanick’s top executive in Asia
urged managers to focus on driving growth, even when “fires start to
burn”. “Know this is a normal part of Uber’s business,” he
said. “Embrace the chaos. It means you’re doing something
meaningful.”

Kalanick appeared to put that ethos into practice in January 2016,
when Uber’s attempts to upend markets in Europe led to angry
protests in Belgium, Spain, Italy and France from taxi drivers who
feared for their livelihoods.

Amid taxi strikes and riots in Paris, Kalanick ordered French
executives to retaliate by encouraging Uber drivers to stage a
counter-protest with mass civil disobedience.

Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks
from “extreme right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests
and were “spoiling for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his
team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he
said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be
resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.”

The decision to send Uber drivers into potentially volatile protests,
despite the risks, was consistent with what one senior former
executive told the Guardian was a strategy of “weaponising”
drivers, and exploiting violence against them to “keep the
controversy burning”.

It was a playbook that, leaked emails suggest, was repeated in Italy,
Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

When masked men, reported to be angry taxi drivers, turned on Uber
drivers with knuckle-dusters and a hammer in Amsterdam in March 2015,
Uber staffers sought to turn it to their advantage to win concessions
from the Dutch government.

Driver victims were encouraged to file police reports, which were
shared with De Telegraaf, the leading Dutch daily newspaper. They
“will be published without our fingerprint on the front page
tomorrow”, one manager wrote. “We keep the violence narrative
going for a few days, before we offer the solution.”

Kalanick’s spokesperson questioned the authenticity of some
documents. She said Kalanick “never suggested that Uber should take
advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety” and any
suggestion that he was involved in such activity would be
“completely false”.

Uber’s spokesperson also acknowledged past mistakes in the
company’s treatment of drivers but said no one, including Kalanick,
wanted violence against Uber drivers. “There is much our former CEO
said nearly a decade ago that we would certainly not condone today,”
she said. “But one thing we do know and feel strongly about is that
no one at Uber has ever been happy about violence against a driver.”

THE ‘KILL SWITCH’

Uber drivers were undoubtedly the target of vicious assaults and
sometimes murders by furious taxi drivers. And the cab-hailing app, in
some countries, found itself battling entrenched and monopolised taxi
fleets with cosy relationships with city authorities. Uber often
characterised its opponents in the regulated taxi markets as operating
a “cartel”.

However, privately, Uber executives and staffers appear to have been
in little doubt about the often rogue nature of their own operation.

In internal emails, staff referred to Uber’s “other than legal
status”, or other forms of active non-compliance with regulations,
in countries including Turkey, South Africa, Spain, the Czech
Republic, Sweden, France, Germany, and Russia.

One senior executive wrote in an email: “We are not legal in many
countries, we should avoid making antagonistic statements.”
Commenting on the tactics the company was prepared to deploy to
“avoid enforcement”, another executive wrote: “We have
officially become pirates.”

Nairi Hourdajian, Uber’s head of global communications, put it even
more bluntly in a message to a colleague in 2014, amid efforts to shut
the company down in Thailand and India: “Sometimes we have problems
because, well, we’re just fucking illegal.” Contacted by the
Guardian, Hourdajian declined to comment.

Kalanick’s spokesperson
[[link removed]] accused
reporters of “pressing its false agenda” that he had “directed
illegal or improper conduct”.

Uber’s spokesperson said that, when it started, “ridesharing
regulations did not exist anywhere in the world” and transport laws
were outdated for a smartphone era.

Across the world, police, transport officials and regulatory agencies
sought to clamp down on Uber. In some cities, officials downloaded the
app and hailed rides so they could crack down on unlicensed taxi
journeys, fining Uber drivers and impounding their cars. Uber offices
in dozens of countries were repeatedly raided by authorities.

Support Guardian investigations like this With your help, we can
expose wrongdoing and demand redress  

Support the Guardian
[[link removed]]

Travis Kalanick speaking to students in Mumbai in 2016. Photograph:
Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

Kalanick’s spokesperson said such “kill switch” protocols were
common business practice and not designed to obstruct justice. She
said the protocols, which did not delete data, were vetted and
approved by Uber’s legal department, and the former Uber CEO was
never charged in relation to obstruction of justice or a related
offence.

The Uber campaign: how ex-Obama aides helped sell firm to world
[[link removed]] 

Read more
[[link removed]]

Uber’s spokesperson said its kill switch software “should never
have been used to thwart legitimate regulatory action” and it had
stopped using the system in 2017, when Khosrowshahi replaced Kalanick
as CEO.

Another executive the leaked files suggest was involved in kill switch
protocols was Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, who ran Uber’s operations in
western Europe. He now runs Uber Eats, and sits on the company’s
11-strong executive team.

Gore-Coty said in a statement he regretted “some of the tactics used
to get regulatory reform for ridesharing in the early days”. Looking
back, he said: “I was young and inexperienced and too often took
direction from superiors with questionable ethics.”

Politicians now also face questions about whether they took direction
from Uber executives.

When a French police official in 2015 appeared to ban one of Uber’s
services in Marseille, Mark MacGann, Uber’s chief lobbyist in
Europe, the Middle East and Africa, turned to Uber’s ally in the
French cabinet.

“I will look at this personally,” Macron texted back. “At this
point, let’s stay calm.”

_Uber files reporting: HARRY DAVIES, SIMON GOODLEY, FELICITY LAWRENCE,
PAUL LEWIS, LISA O’CARROLL, JOHN COLLINGRIDGE, JOHANA BHUIYAN, SAM
CUTLER, ROB DAVIES, STEPHANIE KIRCHGAESSNER, JENNIFER RANKIN, JON
HENLEY, ROWENA MASON, ANDREW ROTH, PAMELA DUNCAN, DAN MILMO, MIKE
SAFI, DAVID PEGG AND BEN BUTLER._

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* Uber
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* Police
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* Lobbying
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