Yeah it's hard to see how any French official would have authority to conduct searches 10 meters beyond French borders, let alone over all of Uber's computers located in dozens of other countries.
Hard to see how a company can imagine it can do business in a country and not follow that country’s record keeping laws and be subject to criminal and civil statutes in that country.
If you do business in France, you are accountable in France. Your problem to provide the asked documents if it's the law to provide them. That you are using computers elsewhere to store stuff should not be any relevant.
You shouldn't really be able to have it both ways, should you?
Uber's files and computers located in French territory are of course accountable to French authorities, but that's simply not the case for those located in other jurisdictions…
Unless there is some international law or treaty mandating that?
Authorities might not be able to seize computers and files in another country, although I think interpol can get involved in tax fraud or tax evasion matters.
Preventing access to your accounts during an audit is quite fishy, especially for an onsite audit without warning which, in France, is supposed to happen only if the authorities have doubts that you could make some evidences disappear. During an audit, the CEO is supposed to provide the documents, the inspectors are not supposed to access your files themselves I think.
(So blocking access for security reasons is bullshit, to answer someone else, the right thing to do is to have all the pieces in order for when an audit happens anyway)
Unless it’s legally mandatory in such a way that superior authorities can’t overrule it, then it doesn’t seem to matter? (such as the President, appellate courts, etc…)
Clearly in this case Uber got a superior authority to do so, and in any future case that will still be a likely possibility.
It's not a matter of what's located in France. It's a matter of what documentation about your company requires you to keep. Regardless of where the computers you use are physically located if you can't produce the required documents you get to be fined, be shut down, and/or go to prison. No company gets to play the game of "we're doing business in Uzbekistan but our accounting servers are in Sealand so we don't have to file any taxes or provide any other records." Not only is the idea absurd, anyone who thinks that is congenitally stupid or stupid by choice.
Attempted insults only decrease the credibility of the writer… anyways I didn’t claim Uber is supplying less than the legally required amount of paperwork?
Nor is it likely.
All the accounting, insurance, banking, regulatory, etc… paperwork legally necessary for even a large company in France can easily fit in a set of binders that fit in a single bookcase.
So it’s literally possible for all of it to be ready and available for inspection before anyone even touches a keyboard. And in fact that was the case for every company in France pre 1960s.
If a company is doing business here, the actual location of file is irrelevant.
Also when the government is really motivated, he can arrested the founders or executives directly (Pavel Durov). Which is what they should do to Netflix execs if they are doing business illegally.
>Also when the government is really motivated, he can arrested the founders or executives directly (Pavel Durov). Which is what they should do to Netflix execs if they are doing business illegally.
You're in favor of holding executives hostage to demand access to data? If they actually did something illegal, they can be arrested/tried for that, but arresting executives as a means to coerce companies into doing stuff is a total perversion of the rule of law.
> You're in favor of holding executives hostage to demand access to data? If they actually did something illegal, they can be arrested/tried for that, but arresting executives as a means to coerce companies into doing stuff is a total perversion of the rule of law.
Turns out that witholding data as a company executive is outright illegal, so yeah, we're in favor of it and they can get arrested and charged for for it.
>Turns out that witholding data as a company executive is outright illegal, so yeah, we're in favor of it and they can get arrested and charged for for it.
Except in this case it's not the executive that has the data. The data is sitting on some cloud server somewhere, and the executive no longer has access because the CISO got wind of the raid and locked his account. If you're holding the executive, you're not holding the executive because he's refusing to cooperate with a warrant, you're holding the executive as a hostage so HQ would turn over the document.
> You're in favor of holding executives hostage to demand access to data?
This is a very emotional way of saying "you're in favour of enforcing contempt of court rulings against people who try to obstruct the judicial process".
This situation already happened with X/Twitter when the Brazilian Supreme Court attempted to compel Elon & co to disclose the social media accounts of alleged rioters. Unfortunately, it seems few people learn from even recent history.