Star executive quit Uber as it faced pressure over UK tax structure
Uber lost one of its most successful dealmakers at a time when the company feared his position at the cab-hailing app would undermine its tax avoidance structure, leaked documents suggest.
The leaked notes record that Fraser Robinson – one of Uber’s star executives who was based in London and had led its $3.5bn investment deal with Saudi Arabia in 2016 – was told by a senior executive that he would “have to move to AMS [Amsterdam]”. Uber was seeking to persuade UK tax collectors that the company was not being partly managed – and therefore taxable – in the UK.
A document in the Uber files, a trove of confidential files leaked to the Guardian, noted: “[Robinson] refused to move to AMS … HMRC claim that Uber’s EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa] earnings [are] taxable in UK because of Fraser.”
The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant's most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, duped police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.
To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.
In a statement, Uber said: «We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that
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