![]() ![]() 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. 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 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. 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 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. While Quebec tax authorities were executing a search warrant at Uber’s offices in Old Montreal on May 14, 2015, computers and electronic devices were encrypted remotely and rebooted by engineers at Uber headquarters in San Francisco. 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. 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. 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. They seized 14 computers, 74 phones and some documents, according to court records obtained by CBC/Radio-Canada. Worried that data on the devices might be being manipulated from afar, the agents powered them down. 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. On May 13, 2015, they got a search warrant, and the next day they raided the company's premises. ![]() ![]() 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. 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. ![]()
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