My understanding is that statement is false; let's be careful not to mislead people about these issues. And in that spirit, I should make clear that my understanding is based only on the following, not on direct knowledge:
* The ungoogled-chromium project, which aims to remove from Chromium the privacy threats from Google:
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
A number of features or background services communicate with Google servers despite the absence of an associated Google account or compiled-in Google API keys. Furthermore, the normal build process for Chromium involves running Google's own high-level commands that invoke many scripts and utilities, some of which download and use pre-built binaries provided by Google. Even the final build output includes some pre-built binaries.
* There's also the Inox patchset, with similar aims:
https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset
Inox patchset is applied on the chromium source code and tries to prevent data transmission to Google to get a minimal Chromium based browser
* And finally, Iridium, a browser based on Chromium:
Chromium (which Iridium is based on) is a very secure browser, yes. But it does call home to Google and we did even more to enhance security to the maximum extent possible.
Also, AFAIK Chrome doesn't send anything to Google if you disable corresponding options, I think the only thing that cannot be disabled is sending an unique installation ID when you first install it (so that they can track number of installations). Do you have some data on Chrome doing more than that which cannot be disabled from settings?