Uber’s “most secret corner” was revealed: 120,000 confidential information, exposing the history of black hearts

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Spending huge sums of money on public relations and politicians, using drivers, and evading supervision.

Text｜Edited by Juny｜VickyXiao

Source: Silicon Stars

The global shared travel giant Uber, which has been silent for nearly two years during the epidemic and has halved its market value, has returned to the center of the public eye in the past two days. However, this return isn’t something to cheer about for Uber.

Since yesterday, a major investigation involving more than 40 media and more than 180 journalists around the world has been released one after another, exposing various bottomless operations of Uber in the process of global expansion in the past few years, including but not limited to : Rewriting laws and regulations through political and business collusion, maliciously using drivers to pave the way for business expansion, obstructing investigations by obstructing investigations by knowing the law and breaking the law, and large-scale tax avoidance in an organized and planned manner.

The most important thing is that the 124,000 internal documents from Uber this time not only provide solid evidence for Uber’s previous black history rumors, but also open up an intricate picture of Uber and Western politicians, billionaires, and media tycoons. network of relationships.

In these exposed documents, the figures involved are all “top-notch” in the political arena, including French Prime Minister Macron, US President Biden, former European Commission Vice President Nelly Cross and so on. According to the survey, the incident involved more than 1,850 important political and business figures from 29 countries around the world.

At present, this incident is constantly fermenting, and public opinion in various countries is in an uproar. Some countries, including France, have begun to call for an internal investigation, and some netizens even regard the “Ubergate” as a “new Watergate incident”.

｜Spend huge sums of money on “public relations” to reach the power centers of various countries

The more than 120,000 documents were provided by former Uber chief lobbying representative Mark MacGann, including 83,000 emails between Uber executives, as well as tens of thousands of iMessages and Whatsapp and other information records, PPT, invoices, etc., time span From 2013 to 2017.

At that time, Uber was mainly run by its former CEO Travis Kalanick, and it was also the fastest period of Uber’s business expansion in the world. In October 2010, Uber’s ride-sharing 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 Silicon Valley startup scene.

Behind the rapid expansion, is it just because of the innovation of its model? The Uber dossier this time tells us that Uber’s most critical success factor is finding the right people.

In 2014, Uber hooked up with Emar Macron, then the French economy minister, and thus began their “secret alliance.” In October 2014, Macron held a closed-door meeting with Travis Kalanick and other Uber executives and made a number of important “progresses,” according to the documents.

In the following years, Macron has repeatedly supported Uber in secret, including publicly recognizing the Uber model many times, signing a decree to relax the requirements for Uber driver licenses, and formulating a regulatory framework for Uber’s ride-sharing service. From the exchanges between Macron and Travis Kalanick, it can be seen that they are very familiar and their interests are deeply bound.

In July 2015, when the UberPOP service caused a huge controversy in France, Kalanick sent a text message and asked Macron: “Can we trust Caz (the then Prime Minister of France, Bernard Cazeneuve)?” Macron replied that he had met with the Prime Minister yesterday and had The French cabinet has made a deal in secret, he will keep taxi drivers calm and prepare reform bills.

In another email, Uber expressed gratitude to Macron, saying “the openness and welcome we have received is unusual in any political-business relationship.”

And Macron is just the tip of the iceberg in this “official-business collusion” drama.

Another key official involved in the Uber dossier is former European Commission vice-president Nelly Cross. She previously oversaw digital technology and competition policy, and played a leading role in investigating Microsoft and Intel’s digital competition cases. The documents disclosed this time show that Nelly Cross repeatedly asked law enforcement officers to “give the green light” for Uber during her tenure. In addition, she did not comply with the 18-month cooling-off period rule for the conduct of the EU supervisory commissioner. In talks to join Uber’s advisory board.

In an internal Uber message, Uber made it clear that the relationship with Nelly Cross was highly confidential and that no one was allowed to discuss it outside the group, and that Nelly Cross was still helping to “lobby” then Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

The documents revealed that during the Davos meeting in 2016, a group of more than a dozen Uber executives participated in the meeting, and through various intermediary relationships, including Mark Ling, then US Vice President Biden, then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin. World leaders such as Netanyahu, then-Irish Prime Minister Nda Kenny, and then-Estonian President Thomas Hendrick Ilves were in a secret meeting.

At that time, Travis Kalanick can be said to be very arrogant. In the text message in the exposure, he said that for Biden who was late, “I have let my people let him know that every minute he is late, he is with me time. One minute less.”

And right after their meeting, Biden adjusted his keynote speech at Davos later in the day to help covertly promote Uber.

In 2016 alone, Uber spent as much as $90 million on lobbying and public relations, documents show. It has also formed stakeholders by selling Uber shares to powerful figures in Russia, Italy and Germany, while recruiting a large number of former public officials to lobby politicians in various countries to loosen government regulations on Uber’s business, Change worker rights policy and draft a new taxi bill, etc.

It is understood that French telecommunications tycoon Xavier Neal, German publishing tycoon Axel Springer, and French fashion tycoon Bernard Arnault are all involved. In the U.S., Uber also provides government officials with free Uber rides, “super-premium” lunches, free political campaign jobs, campaign contributions and various gifts to gain U.S. government support for Uber’s international business.

Between 2014 and 2016, Uber executives held more than 100 meetings with top government officials in 17 countries, according to the joint investigation team. In order to better connect with these dignitaries, rich people and top scholars, Uber also commissioned a consulting agency to develop a list of “stakeholders” of more than 1,850 people in 29 countries around the world.

｜Taking chaos as a ladder: Malicious use of drivers to divert tax attention

In addition to using improper means to exert power at the decision-making level, Uber management has also taken a lot of bottomless measures to solve 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 from taxi drivers in Belgium, Spain, Italy, France and other countries. In response to these protests, Uber executives actively sought out politicians from various countries to put out the fire, while actually giving orders to employees to fan the flames and promote the escalation of the situation.

For example, in the protests in Paris, many taxi drivers became emotional and there were a small number of violent clashes. In this regard, Travis Kalanick sent a letter to the executives of the branch to “revenge”, and asked them to encourage local Uber drivers to also launch large-scale protests, intending to escalate the confrontation between the two sides and cause greater riots, so as to urge the government to reform the law. Effect. In the email he said: “Embrace chaos, which means you are doing something meaningful… Violence guarantees success.”

A former Uber executive said Uber was completely “weaponizing” its drivers, not caring about their conditions, but using them to force concessions from the government.

At the same time, Uber will quietly collect the violence of traditional taxi drivers during the protests, write them into stories, and send them to the local media with pictures and texts, trying to smear the image of regular taxi drivers in the public. In the disclosure document, an Uber employee reported to management: “They [these stories] will be on the front page tomorrow without our fingerprints.”

Such dramas have been staged in many places in the past few years and have become Uber’s “secret weapon” to resolve disputes.

On top of that, Uber is also shifting its own tax liability to drivers. As countries advance their business, Uber often preemptively develops “solutions” to ensure that local Uber drivers pay taxes, allowing local governments to shift the tax focus from the company itself to the drivers.

Such a strategy was entirely orchestrated by Uber. For example, in a Nigerian business memorandum, a local Uber executive reported to the parent company that “We met with the tax authorities in Lagos, and they praised our efforts to ensure drivers were tax compliant and successfully brought them The focus has shifted from Uber’s ‘tax evasion’ to working together to ensure drivers are compliant.”

In addition, since 2013, Uber has begun to plan the “US-Netherlands-Bermuda” tax avoidance structure, transferring all the income from the European market to the tax haven Bermuda through the intellectual property transfer mechanism, and also produced 29.5 billion US dollars. The deductible costs will not be taxed for decades.

｜Invent Kill Switch, maliciously obstruct regulatory investigation

In addition, the document also disclosed that in the face of government supervision and scrutiny of Uber, Uber is completely in a state of “knowing the law and breaking the law”.

As can be seen in the conversations among Uber’s internal executives, they repeatedly mentioned “our business is illegal in many countries,” and “this practice is illegal”, but they consistently chose to ignore Local laws, and calling themselves “pirates,” say traffic laws are outdated for the smartphone age.

Regulators in many countries have tried to raid Uber and collect evidence of its illegal operations, but they have often failed. The reason is that Uber invented a function called Kill Switch internally in order to fight regulation. This feature is designed to quickly cut off local devices’ access to the company’s main data systems if Uber’s offices are raided.

The document shows that the feature was enabled at least 12 times in countries including France, the Netherlands, Belgium, India, Hungary and Romania. Did Travis Kalanick personally give the order before an Amsterdam police raid to hit the kill switch immediately, be sure to turn it off before the police arrive?

When the kill switch is activated, Uber employees have been trained to collectively act dumb. They’ll find reasons to say there’s a problem with the computer, or maybe a technician at the San Francisco headquarters fell asleep.

Uber’s Kill Switch trick has been tried and tested, and this “hooliganism” lets inspectors know they’re lying, but there’s nothing they can do about it. One Uber executive even said “proudly” in a debriefing text message, “We’ve used this playbook many times, and now the hardest part is being surprised.”

In response to the large number of facts exposed this time, Uber officials did not deny it, but also stated that “the Kill Switch has never been used since the new CEO took office”, “the past behavior is inconsistent with the current values”, “Today Uber It’s a different company.”

Indeed, some people may also say that this was a few years ago, and Travis Kalanick also stepped down in 2017, so let’s just let these things go with the wind. But from another point of view, the significance of this in-depth investigation of the matter by more than 180 journalists around the world may not lie in Uber itself, but to explore what caused the scandal, and whether there are other similar something is happening?

After all, when you spot a cockroach in the sun, maybe there are too many in the shade.

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