“I can’t wait to return to the UK and get back to what I love most: my family and innovation in my field,” said the man who has been an advisor to two British Prime Ministers after the verdict was handed down by a jury in San Francisco, California.
Originally from the East of England, the 59-year-old entrepreneur is one of six people who disappeared when a luxury ship sank on the night of Sunday to Monday near Palermo.
Mr Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who was also on board, was rescued.
The businessman, who is worth 500 million pounds (587 million euros) according to the latest “Rich List” of the Sunday Times, owes his rise to Autonomy.
He founded this software publisher in 1996 in Cambridge, a university town where he earned his doctorate, and turned it into a British technology flagship, to the point that it was bought in 2011 by the American group HP for $11 billion.
But in recent years, the entrepreneur has been most talked about for the fraud affair that followed this transaction and cast a shadow over what until then appeared to be a rare “success story” in British tech.
HP had accused Autonomy of having rigged its accounts, accusing Mike Lynch in particular of having artificially inflated the company’s declared revenues, revenue growth and margins.
The American group had then written down almost $9 billion in depreciation.
In 2023, Mr. Lynch was extradited from the United Kingdom to the United States to stand trial. The American justice system considered that he presented a “serious risk of flight”, he was placed under house arrest in San Francisco under the surveillance of a private security service at his expense.
“Scapegoat”
He was acquitted in June in San Francisco in the criminal part of the case.
Although Mr. Lynch had pocketed some $815 million during the sale of Autonomy, he denied all the charges, accusing HP in return of making him a “scapegoat for its own failures”.
“I have several medical problems that would have made my survival difficult” if incarcerated in the United States, he told the British newspaper The Times at the end of June, after returning to the United Kingdom.
A father of two daughters aged 18 and 21, this dog lover – he owns two dachshunds and four sheepdogs – lives in the affluent London district of Chelsea, according to the newspaper. He also owns a farm in Suffolk (in the east of England).
But the fraud case is not closed: in 2022, the British courts ruled in a civil trial that HP had been duped and had paid too much. The judges have yet to rule on the billions of dollars in damages claimed by the American group.
Also sued by HP, the former financial director of Autonomy, Sushovan Hussain, was also found guilty of fraud in 2018 by an American jury, which earned him a five-year prison sentence.
The shadow of Mr. Lynch’s legal troubles has long weighed on the stock price of another British company: the cybersecurity and artificial intelligence group Darktrace, of which he is an early investor.
But in a reversal of fortune, Darktrace accepted a $5.3 billion buyout offer from U.S. private equity firm Thoma Bravo in April, sending its stock price soaring.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Lynch declined to comment when contacted by AFP on Monday.
This article is originally published on nicematin.com
