DOJ Shares Criminal Probe Evidence With Judge In Waymo vs. Uber Suit

Uber executives also visited the company’s autonomous vehicle research group in Pittsburgh and instructed the unit’s researchers to use the secret communications that the company had developed, reportedly explaining that it was necessary to keep information from showing up in court during civil or criminal proceedings.

Following the testimony about Uber’s practices, Judge Alsup has ordered Uber to turn over an unredacted copy of the Jacobs letter as well as a complete list of all employees who used the Wickr app and its secure communications service.

At this point in the Waymo vs. Uber case, several things are coming clear. One is that there’s lot more at stake than millions of dollars in potential damages from the civil case, which wouldn’t hurt Uber all that much.

Unprecedented legal step

Now it’s clear that the DOJ is actively pursuing criminal charges against the company and its senior management. One of those leaders who appears to be liable is Travis Kalanick, who could face prosecution if investigators find sufficient evidence that he knew and approved the illegal activities at his company.

The criminal investigation of Uber’s practices also put at risk the massive investment being considered by SoftBank and its CEO Masayoshi Son, who by now must have doubts about investing in a company with such an uncertain future.

The constant stream of revelations about Uber’s legally dubious practices must be making Uber’s new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, wonder about the wisdom of taking on the job, although it must be said that when he found out about the practices, he stopped them.

What Khosrowshahi can’t stop is potentially long-lasting damage to the nascent autonomous vehicle industry. The growing evidence of Uber’s illegal, unethical and anti-competitive practices, if proven in the courts, could effectively sabotage the industry by delaying development while squandering the research of its own engineers who were doing legitimate work on autonomous vehicle technology.

Eventually, self-driving cars and freight-carrying trucks will appear in growing numbers on U.S. highways. But whether Uber will have any significant role in that effort is appearing increasingly doubtful. It’s also impossible to tell how many months or years these research efforts have been set back by the unethical practices revealed so far in the legal against again Uber.

It’s also questionable whether Uber will ultimately survive as a going concern in the ride-sharing business. If the DOJ moves to indict Uber executives; if the civil case results in massive damage awards; or the court orders Uber to disgorge the fruits of research based on stolen trade secrets, Uber’s future even as an independent ride-sharing company could be bleak.

Perhaps the only way Khosrowshahi can save the company is to convince the board to remove Kalanick along with his appointees and to terminate all of the executives and senior employees proven to have been involved in illegal operations.

While Khosrowshahi has said that he wants to keep the employees in place, by now he must realize that the trade secrets lawsuit and now the criminal investigation is growing cancer inside the company. The only way to cure this cancer is to remove it completely even though it will leave an ugly scar. But a scar is better than corporate death, which could be the eventual outcome if Uber doesn’t cure itself.

Originally published on eWeek

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