Not so clean as that, the uberization of the economy… Because even if since its foundation in 2010, Uber has inspired the profound transformation of several economic sectors, the “Uber Files” teach us today that this omelette cannot be is not made without breaking eggs. On the menu: systematized secretiveness with the tax authorities, high-cost seduction of prominent politicians and business practices, if not illegal, at the very least suspect.
The “Uber Files” are made up of a total of 124,000 files, including 83,000 emails and text messages exchanged by top Uber executives since 2010. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which brings together several major national media including the washington post, The Guardian and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, released details of those documents Monday morning.
Many of the issues raised by these documents were already known, but some revelations are still surprising. Here are six.
“Violence guarantees success”
This is without a doubt the most sensational statement made by the founder and CEO of Uber until 2017, Travis Kalanick. The previous year, the American entrepreneur reacted by text message to a demonstration in France by some 2,000 taxi drivers who opposed the use of Uber in France.
Mr Kalanick reportedly asked his subordinates to stage a counter-protest bringing together Uber drivers to show their affection for the mobile service. Faced with fears that this strategy would lead to violent confrontations where his drivers could be injured, he replied: “I think it is worth it… Violence guarantees success”.
Revenue Quebec bypassed
One of the most astonishing technical elements of the Uber service is the systematic installation on the servers, workstations and cell phones of its employees of a circuit breaker that automatically erases files deemed sensitive. This circuit breaker was used a few times in 2015, including at least once in the company’s Montreal offices when Revenue Quebec agents wanted to consult Uber Canada’s tax documents to see if its application collected the QST to its users.
According to what Radio-Canada reports, Revenu Québec agents seized nearly a hundred computer devices after noticing that the phones, tablets and laptops present in the premises of Uber had all restarted at the same time.
This circuit breaker was used on at least two other occasions during the same year, in France and the Netherlands.
Canadian mayors under the spell
To ensure its presence in major Canadian cities, Uber tried to seduce many mayors and provincial ministers, many of whom initially believed the service to be illegal. The UberX passenger transport service, introduced on the Canadian market in 2014, was initially decried by several mayors, including Denis Coderre, mayor of Montreal at the time. A few weeks later, the city of Toronto even obtained an injunction against Uber. Toronto believed Uber was in violation of its taxi and limousine regulations.
It did not take more than a few hours after this request for an injunction for Mayor John Tory to publish his own press release in which he said he supported the Californian company. “Uber is technology whose time has come and is here to stay,” he wrote, after efforts by the company to “get [une] extremely positive response” from him, certain documents contained in the Uber Files confirm.
Emmanuel yours and yours with Travis
Freshly become French Minister of the Economy, Emmanuel Macron had some very cordial exchanges by text messaging with the CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick. This cordiality quickly turned into a bond of trust between the two, who called each other by their first names. Macron later met with Uber’s chief lobbyist for Europe, Mark MacGann, before becoming a proponent of more lenient regulation of paid passenger services like what Uber was doing at the time.
The former commissioner for digital affairs for the European Union Neelie Kroes would have been offered a job at Uber while she was still commissioner. She would then secretly lobby for Uber, something that goes against the European Commission’s code of ethics.
Uber and the Russian billionaires
With the objective in mind of ensuring its presence in Russia, Uber would have hired in 2015 and 2016 a political agent closely linked to several Russian billionaires and whose mission was to buy their influence from President Vladimir Putin. According to what documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reveal, the bribes were part of the means made available to the Russian agent in order to “grease the wheels” of the Russian legislative machine.
Uber is said to have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Vladimir Semin, a pro-Kremlin Russian lobbyist with great influence with the government, a move that would be against the anti-corruption laws in the United States, to which American companies like Uber are subject. .
“Legal and legislative shit storm”
Uber’s growth in its first five years has been spectacular. It inspired a host of other such services, apps that broke the rules—if not the laws, outright—in different industries. This led to the creation of the phrase “ uberization of the economy”, where disruptive technologies turned entire industries upside down.
Nothing describes Uber’s early days better than the comments of its top European lobbyist as the app tried to take hold in Poland. To a consultant who asked him how to do it, he wrote: “Basically, we start Uber, and then we tackle a storm of legal and legislative shit.” This storm was described as a “pyramid of shit” in certain presentations where the floors were made up of “prosecutions of drivers”, “regulatory investigations”, “administrative procedures” and “disputes” of all kinds.