Uber, the global shared travel giant that has been dormant for nearly two years during the epidemic and whose market value has been cut in half, has returned to the center of public attention in the past two days. However, this return is not something to be happy about for Uber.
Since yesterday, a blockbuster investigation involving more than 40 media and more than 180 reporters from around the world has been released, revealing Uber's various bottomless operations in the past few years of global expansion, including but not limited to: rewriting laws and regulations through political and business collusion, maliciously using drivers to pave the way for business expansion, knowing and breaking the law and deleting data to obstruct investigations, organized and planned large-scale tax avoidance, etc.
The most important thing is that the 124,000 internal documents from Uber not only provide ironclad evidence for various previous rumors about Uber’s dark history, but also open up a complicated network of relationships between Uber and Western politicians, billionaires, and media tycoons.
In these exposed documents, the figures involved are all "top figures" in the political arena, including French Prime Minister Macron, US President Biden, former European Commission Vice President Neely Cross, etc. Investigations show that the incident may involve more than 1,850 important political and business figures from 29 countries around the world.
At present, this incident is continuing to ferment, and public opinion in various countries is in an uproar. Some countries, including France, have begun calling for the launch of internal investigations, and some netizens even regard this "Ubergate" as a "new Watergate incident."
spent heavily on "public relations" to reach the power centers of various countries.
This time, more than 120,000 documents were provided by Mark MacGann, Uber's former chief lobbying representative, including 83,000 emails between Uber executives, as well as tens of thousands of iMessages and Whatsapp information records, PPTs, invoices, etc., spanning 2013 to 2017.
At that time, Uber was mainly controlled by its former CEO Travis Kalanick. It was also a period when Uber's business was expanding globally. In October 2010, Uber's shared taxi business was officially launched in the United States. By 2017, Uber had successfully entered more than 80 countries around the world, becoming the most dazzling new star in the entrepreneurial field of Silicon Valley . Is the reason behind the rapid expansion of
just because of the innovation of its model? This Uber profile tells us that the most critical success factor for Uber is that they found the right people.
In 2014, Uber got in touch with Emal Macron, then French Minister of Economy, and their "secret alliance" began. Documents show that in October 2014, Macron held a closed-door meeting with Travis Kalanick and other Uber executives and made a lot of important "progress."
In the following years, Macron repeatedly supported Uber overtly and covertly, including publicly stating his approval of the Uber model, signing a decree relaxing the requirements for Uber driver licenses, and formulating a regulatory framework for ride-sharing services for Uber. From the exchanges between Macron and Travis Kalanick, we can see that they are very familiar with each other and their interests are deeply bound.
In July 2015, the UberPOP service caused huge controversy in France. Kalanick sent a text message asking Macron: "Can we trust Caz (then French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve)?" Macron responded that he had met with the Prime Minister yesterday and had secretly reached a deal with the French cabinet. He would ensure that taxi drivers remained calm and prepare a reform bill.
In another email, Uber expressed its gratitude to Macron, saying, "The openness and welcome we have received are unusual in any political and business relationship."
And Macron is just the tip of the iceberg in this drama of "official-business collusion."
Another key official implicated in the Uber dossier is former European Commission Vice President Neely Cross. She was previously responsible for overseeing digital technology and competition policy, and played a leading role in investigating Microsoft and Intel digital competition cases.The documents disclosed this time show that Neely Cross repeatedly asked law enforcement officials to give Uber a "green light" during her tenure. In addition, she did not comply with the 18-month cooling-off period rules for the behavior of the EU regulatory committee. She was already negotiating to join Uber's advisory board before leaving her job.
stated in an internal message from Uber that Uber made it clear that the relationship with Neely Cross was highly confidential and no one was allowed to discuss it outside the group. It also stated that Neely Cross was also helping to "lobby" the then Prime Minister of the Netherlands.
documents revealed that during the 2016 Davos meeting, more than a dozen Uber executives participated in the meeting and had secret meetings with world leaders including Mark Ling, then US Vice President Biden, then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, and then Estonian President Thomas Hendrik Ilves through various intermediary relationships.
Travis Kalanick could be said to be very arrogant at the time. In the exposed text message, he said that for Biden who was late, "I have asked my people to let him know that every minute he is late, he will have one less minute with me."
Just after their meeting, Biden adjusted the keynote speech he would deliver at Davos later that day, secretly helping to promote Uber. The
file shows that Uber spent as much as $90 million on lobbying and public relations in 2016 alone. has also sold Uber shares to powerful figures in Russia, Italy, and Germany to form stakeholders. At the same time, it has recruited a large number of former public officials to lobby politicians in various countries to relax government supervision of Uber's business, change workers' rights policies, and draft new taxi bills.
It is understood that including France Telecom tycoon Xavier Neil , German publishing tycoon Axel Springer, French fashion tycoon Bernard Arnault, etc. are all involved. In the United States, Uber also provides government officials with free Uber rides, "super premium" lunches, free political campaign work, campaign donations, and various gifts to gain the U.S. government's support for Uber's international business.
According to statistics from the joint investigation team, between 2014 and 2016, Uber executives held more than 100 meetings with high-level government officials in 17 countries. In order to better maintain relations with these politicians, rich people and top scholars, Uber also commissioned a consulting agency to develop a "stakeholder" list of more than 1,850 people in 29 countries around the world.
Treat chaos as a ladder: maliciously use drivers to divert tax attention
In addition to using improper methods to exert influence at the decision-making level, Uber management has also adopted a large number of bottom-line measures when solving the Uber protest crisis that broke out in various countries.
In 2016, when Uber vigorously expanded its business in the European market, it caused large-scale protests by taxi drivers in Belgium, , Spain, Italy, France and other countries. In response to these protests, Uber executives, while actively looking for politicians from various countries to put out the fire, actually issued instructions to employees to fan the flames and escalate the situation.
For example, during the protests in Paris, many taxi drivers became emotional and some violent conflicts occurred. In response, Travis Kalanick sent a letter to branch executives ordering "retaliation" and asking them to encourage local Uber drivers to launch large-scale protests, with the intention of provoking an escalation of confrontation between the two parties, triggering greater riots, and thus urging the government to reform the law. In the email, he said: "Embrace chaos, which means you are doing something meaningful... violence guarantees success ."
A former Uber executive said that Uber was completely "weaponizing" its drivers at the time, not caring about the driver's condition, but using them to force the government to make concessions.
At the same time, Uber will also quietly collect the violent actions of traditional taxi drivers during protests, write them into stories, and send them to local media with pictures and texts, trying to vilify the image of regular taxi drivers among the public.In the disclosure document, an Uber employee reported to management: "They (these reports) will be published on the front page tomorrow without our fingerprints." Dramas like
continued to take place in many places during those years, becoming Uber’s “secret weapon” for resolving disputes.
In addition, Uber will also transfer the tax obligations that it should bear to the drivers. When is promoting business in various countries, Uber often preemptively develops "solutions" to ensure that local Uber drivers pay taxes and gives them to the government, allowing local governments to shift their tax focus from the company itself to the drivers. Strategies like
are completely carefully planned by Uber. For example, in Nigeria’s business memorandum, a local Uber executive reported to the parent company, “We met with the tax authorities in Lagos and they praised our efforts in ensuring driver tax compliance and successfully shifted their focus from Uber’s ‘tax evasion’ to Work together to ensure driver compliance."
In addition, Uber has been planning a "U.S.-Netherlands-Bermuda" tax avoidance structure since 2013, transferring all revenue from the European market to Bermuda, a tax haven, through the intellectual property transfer mechanism. It has also created $29.5 billion in deductible costs, and has not had to pay taxes for decades.
invented the Kill Switch and maliciously obstructed regulatory investigations
In addition, this document also revealed that in the face of the supervision and review of Uber by governments around the world, Uber is completely in a state of "knowing the law and breaking the law."
It can be seen in the conversations among Uber's internal executives that they repeatedly mentioned that "our business is illegal in many countries," and "this practice is illegal," but they consistently chose to ignore local laws and called themselves "pirates," saying that traffic laws are outdated for the smartphone era.
Regulatory agencies in many countries have tried to raid Uber and collect evidence of its illegal operations, but often failed. The reason is that in order to resist supervision, Uber invented a function called Kill Switch internally. The function of is to quickly cut off local devices' access to the company's main data systems when Uber's offices are raided. The
document shows that this feature has been enabled at least 12 times in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, India, Hungary, and Romania . Did Travis Kalanick personally issue an order before a Amsterdam police raid, asking him to quickly press the kill switch and turn it off immediately before the police arrived?
When the kill switch is activated, Uber employees are trained to collectively act stupid. They'll come up with an excuse that there's something wrong with the computer, or maybe the technician at 's headquarters in San Francisco fell asleep.
Uber’s Kill Switch trick has been tried and tested repeatedly. This kind of “rogue behavior” makes the inspection agencies know that they are lying, but there is nothing they can do about it. One Uber executive even "proudly" said in a report text message, "We have used this script many times, and the most difficult part now is to show surprise (for the outage)."
In response to the large number of facts exposed this time, Uber officials did not deny it, but they also stated that "the Kill Switch has never been used since the new CEO took office", "past behavior is inconsistent with current values", and "Uber is a different company today."
Indeed, some people may also say that this happened several years ago, and Travis Kalanick also resigned in 2017. It is better to let these past events go away with the wind. But from another perspective, the significance of more than 180 reporters from around the world to jointly investigate this matter may not lie in Uber itself, but to explore what led to the emergence of this scandal, and whether the same thing is happening?
After all, when you find a cockroach in the sun, it may mean there are too many to squeeze in the shadows.
*Reference link:
1.https://www.icij.org/investigations/uber-files/uber-global-rise-lobbying-violence-technology/
*Note: The background of the cover image comes from unsplash, author Viktor Avdeev, and the copyright belongs to the original author. If you do not agree to use it, please contact us as soon as possible.
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