In June, the British entrepreneur, founder of the company Autonomy, won a legal battle that lasted over ten years with the US justice system. However, the holiday with his sailing ship Bayesian on the Sicilian coast turned into a tragedy
Mike Lynch did not have much time to enjoy what he had defined as “a second life”. The British entrepreneur, in fact, was aboard the yacht, the Bayesian, which sank on Sunday night off the Sicilian coast, in Porticello.
Along with Lynch, owner of the boat registered to one of his companies, and his eighteen-year-old daughter Hannah, four other people are missing, according to what was confirmed by the Sicilian Civil Protection. The sailing ship was carrying a total of 22 people: 15 of them were rescued, while the death of one man, the ship’s cook, was confirmed.
The tech tycoon, co-founder of the multinational computer company Autonomy Corporation and other companies, had only returned to the UK in June after an unexpected acquittal by a San Francisco court. Lynch had spent the previous 13 months fighting US justice against conspiracy and wire fraud charges related to the sale of his company to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011 for $11.7 billion (€10.6 billion).
Who is Mike Lynch, the so-called “British Bill Gates”
Mike Lynch, 59, was known as the “British Bill Gates”. From a young age he had shown great mathematical and computer skills and already in his university years he had started developing various technology start-ups.
In 1996 he founded Autonomy, a software company specializing in the analysis of large amounts of data, considered a precursor to Artificial Intelligence. The company was immediately successful and was listed on the stock exchange in 1998.
Thanks to this, Lynch had become and is one of the richest men in the United Kingdom.
Not only that, in 2011 he was hired as a government consultant for technology by the then Prime Minister David Cameron.
After 13 years of legal disputes, Lynch was fully acquitted
Also in 2011, the British entrepreneur had received an offer from the American giant Hewlett-Packard: over 11 billion dollars for the acquisition of Autonomy. Five billion of these would have ended up in Lynch’s pocket.
A year after the acquisition, HP wrote down Autonomy’s value by two-thirds, declaring that it had discovered “serious accounting irregularities” and accusing Lynch and the chief financial officer, Stephen Chamberlain, of having inflated the value of the company.
HP then requested his extradition for trial in the United States.
Lynch spent 12 years fighting against this decision, until he was forced to fly to the United States in May 2023 to face the charges and await trial.
Lynch was placed under house arrest in San Francisco for 13 months, until the trial, which lasted 12 weeks. Since less than 0.5 percent of federal criminal trials in the United States end in acquittals, Lynch’s odds were not good.
Lynch has consistently maintained that he is not guilty and has claimed that HP was trying to pin “buyer’s remorse” on him. In other words, he explained, the company was regretting what it had paid, but that was their choice and, he insisted, it was neither conspiracy nor fraud.
Had he been found guilty, he could have faced up to 25 years in prison.
The legal battle lasted more than a decade, involved a lengthy civil fraud trial in the United Kingdom that awarded damages to HP and cost Lynch more than $30 million (€27.2 million).
On June 6, 2024, however, Lynch was cleared of all 15 charges.
He was finally allowed to return to the UK
On July 27, Lynch gave an exclusive interview to The Times, explaining his defense against the charges, the trial and the millions of documents produced as evidence. He said he insisted on taking the stand to prove he was not the “pantomime villain” prosecutors wanted him to appear to be.
The decision proved to be the right one. Lynch’s lead lawyer, Brian Heberlig, said in his closing argument: “This was the moment for the prosecutor to go for the jugular with the best evidence he had to prove that Mike Lynch was guilty. What happened? You witnessed it. He looked at a chronology of documents, no questions asked.”
“It takes an exponential leap, not justified by the evidence, to conclude that Mike committed fraud,” he said.
Lynch, a married father of two, was finally free to return home.
In the same interview, The Times’ Danny Fortson, who has followed the case since the beginning, wrote that he felt Lynch was “coming out of something like a near-death experience.”
Lynch responded, “That’s exactly how I handled it.”
“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?”
This article is originally published on it.euronews.com
