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Nanny Drops Case Claiming Uber Ex-Engineer Plotted Canada Escape

Nanny Drops Case Claiming Uber Ex-Engineer Plotted Canada Escape

(Bloomberg) -- A woman who said she was a nanny for Anthony Levandowski’s two children dropped her lawsuit which alleged that the former head of Uber Technologies Inc.’s driverless car project discussed fleeing to Canada after he was accused of stealing technology from rival Waymo.

Erika Wong didn’t explain in a court filing last week why she abandoned the lawsuit she filed in January, a month before the Alphabet Inc. unit’s trade-secrets case against the ride-hailing giant went to trial.

In addition to accusing Levandowski of dozens of labor law violations during the half year she worked for him at the beginning of 2017, Wong used her 81-page complaint to chronicle Levandowski’s personal and business dealings. Among other overheard conversations, she claimed the engineer spoke on the phone to his brother about a plan to leave the San Francisco Bay area and move to Alberta to escape the controversy surrounding Waymo’s allegations that he downloaded thousands of its proprietary files before he left a job there and later joined Uber.

A Levandowski representative called the lawsuit meritless in reports by technology news sites when it was filed. Levandowski asserted his constitutional right against self-incrimination and refused to testify in the Waymo-Uber case, which settled in the middle of trial. He wasn’t a defendant in the case.

To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Blumberg in San Francisco at pblumberg1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net, David Glovin

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.