The due diligence report for Uber Technologies Inc.’s acquisition of autonomous vehicle startup Otto is now public, and the document does not bode well for the company’s ongoing trade theft battle with Waymo LLC and its parent company, Alphabet Inc.

A judge first ordered Uber to turn over the report in May, and the report was finally made public on Monday night. The 34-page report, which was compiled by cybersecurity firm Stroz Friedberg, seems to corroborate Waymo’s suspicions that Otto founder Anthony Levandowski retained proprietary information about Google’s self-driving car technology when he left to start his own company.

The report includes details from an interview with Levandowski that occurred just two months after he left Google. According to the interview, Levandowski had several folders on his laptop and his Dropbox account that contained data from Google, but he “did not recall when he last accessed these folders, and he seemed surprised at the amount of Google-related information that was on his laptop.”

Levandowski also claimed during his interview that he did not sync his Google email with his laptop, but he “looked at his laptop and, to his apparent surprise, discovered that he had synced his Google email (anthonyl@google.com) with his laptop in 2014.” The interview also revealed that Levandowski had previously transferred Google files to his personal email.

Perhaps the most damning evidence against Levandowski is proof that he both retained and accessed Google data after he left the company. “Contrary to his belief that there were no or few Google emails on his laptop,” the report says, “Stroz discovered approximately 50,000 Google work email messages that were downloaded onto Levandowski’s computer on September 20, 2014. Ten of those emails were last accessed between September 1, 2015 and January 28, 2016. It is difficult to believe that Levandowski was not, prior to his interview, fully aware of the extent of the data that he had retained.”

Although this information is certainly troubling for Levandowski, it also puts a serious dent in Uber’s claim that it had no knowledge of any Google data that may have been retained prior to its acquisition of Otto.

The document also shows that Levandowski met with several Uber executives, including former Chief Executive Travis Kalanick, nearly half a year before he left Google to found Otto, and Levandowski himself claimed to have more than 200 text messages and emails supporting this claim. According to the report, Levandowski also asked former Uber exec Brian McClendon how much Uber would be willing to pay for Google’s self-driving car division. Levandowski claimed that he wanted to “have a market value for the team.”

The interviews with Levandowski are only the tip of the iceberg for the troubling information contained in the report. Other details reveal that Otto co-founder Lior Ron also met with Uber executives while he was still employed at Google, and he apparently accessed the login screen for Google’s corporate intranet after he left the company, despite his claims to the contrary. Lior also supposedly conducted several searches on how to permanently “securely delete files” from his computer just one day before he left Google.

Uber’s due diligence report paints a worrying picture for the company’s legal defense in its trade theft trial with Waymo, and it is clear why the ride-hailing company had been trying to keep it under wraps. The trial was set to begin on Oct. 10, but Alphabet has been pushing to delay the start date until December to give it time to further review the new evidence from Uber. Today, Judge William Alsup ruled it will be delayed until Dec. 4.

Photo: Uber Technologies