Uber deliberately dodged authorities, ignored rules in early years, leaked documents show

Revenu Quebec agents had been investigating Uber for weeks, including making undercover visits to the company's Montreal offices and following its Quebec general manager to work one day. They suspected the ride-hailing service was improperly declaring that it owed no provincial sales tax and helping some drivers dodge that tax and the federal GST. 

On May 13, 2015, they got a search warrant, and the next day they raided the company's premises. But at 10:40 a.m., at two Uber offices in Montreal, investigators noticed company laptops, smartphones and tablets suddenly all restarted at exactly the same time.

Worried that data on the devices might be being manipulated from afar, the agents powered them down. They seized 14 computers, 74 phones and some documents, according to court records obtained by CBC/Radio-Canada.

Uber's Quebec general manager at the time, Jean-Nicolas Guillemette, told the investigators that 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 Uber used to try to thwart authorities in cities where it was trying to establish its business, according to documents found in the Uber Files, a large new leak of internal records from the gig-economy company. 

The leaked records show how the company that launched itself as a luxury ride service in San Francisco in 2010 tried to surmount legal and political obstacles through a complex choreography of lobbying, cultivating influential allies, dodging authorities and ignoring the rules when they appeared inconvenient.

The leaked files contain 124,000 records, including 83,000 emails, iMessages and Whatsapp exchanges between Uber's most senior executives as well as memos, presentations and invoices. The records, spanning from 2013 to 2017, shed light on a period when Uber was aggressively expanding and operating illegally by ignoring taxi regulations in many cities around the world, including in Canada. 

The files were leaked to The Guardian and shared with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a non-profit newsroom and network of journalists whose media partners include CBC/Radio-Canada, the Toronto Star, the Washington Post, the BBC and Le Monde.

In a statement to the ICIJ, Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for Uber, acknowledged "mistakes" and "missteps" that culminated five years ago in "one of the most infamous reckonings in the history of corporate America," but that the company had changed its practices since 2017. 

The leaked files reveal that a "kill switch," as it was referred to internally, and an encryption software were also deployed in France, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania and India, as government authorities raided company offices to enforce tax, transportation and other laws.

The "kill switch" would remotely cut access to the company servers located in San Francisco and prevent government authorities from getting company files while local staff would still appear to be collaborating with investigators. 

According to a 2015 leaked email from a legal director for Uber in western Europe, the company was particularly concerned that authorities could get access to their list of drivers, making it "much easier for the taxman, regulators and police to terrify our supply" and enforce against it. "If we hand over the driver list, our goose may be cooked," he added.

In one of the first such uses of the kill switch that shows up in the leak, when France's competition and consumer agency raided the company's Paris offices in November 2014, Uber's European legal director at the time sent out an email titled "Kill Paris access now" at 3:14 p.m. local time. Thirteen minutes later, an engineering manager wrote back: "Done now." 

During a July 2015 raid by the French tax agency, Mark MacGann, the top Uber lobbyist in Europe, advised Thibauld Simphal, then head of Uber France, that employees play dumb when the kill switch is activated, according to leaked text messages.