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.
You shouldn't really be able to have it both ways, should you?
Unless there is some international law or treaty mandating that?
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.
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)
Clearly in this case Uber got a superior authority to do so, and in any future case that will still be a likely possibility.
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.
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.
If executives don't want to sit in jail due to their company's shady tactics they can just not approve those tactics.
Alternative would be to shut the business down completely until they cooperate.
You think the VP of Uber France was involved in the approval of global IT policies regarding locking accounts when there's a raid?
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".
it's not clear whether the executive has the ability to turn over the documents.