Tech tycoon Mike Lynch – once hailed as the UK’s answer to Bill Gates – is facing the possibility of 20 years in a US jail in one of the biggest fraud cases ever to embroil a British businessman.
The 53-year-old has been charged on multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud over the £8.5billion sale of his successful software firm Autonomy.
The indictment from the US department of justice was filed in San Francisco. It claims that Mr Lynch, and former finance executive Stephen Chamberlain, inflated Autonomy’s performance from 2009 until it was sold to Hewlett Packard in 2011.
Founder of Autonomy Mike Lynch has been charged on multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud over the £8.5billion sale of his successful software firm
The US authorities are trying to force father-of-two Mr Lynch to hand over the £640million he made from selling Autonomy to HP.
Yesterday, Mr Lynch stood down from several committees of the prestigious Royal Society and reluctantly resigned as a Government science and technology adviser to concentrate on clearing his name.
Britain's answer to Bill Gates?
Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy
A balding, stocky figure, Mike Lynch is a proudly self-made man who lives in a Georgian manor house set within a 70-acre estate in East Anglia.
The fruits of his success include an ivy-clad, five-storey townhouse in Chelsea, worth more than £20million. He is also said to have bought a $30million yacht.
Mr Lynch, the son of a nurse and a fireman, grew up near Chelmsford, Essex. As a ferociously bright boy, he won a scholarship to private school and went on to read natural sciences at Christ’s College Cambridge.
He formed Autonomy with mathematician Richard Gaunt in 1996, based on his observation that equations formulated in the 18th century by an obscure Presbyterian minister, Thomas Bayes, could be used to sift and organise masses of data.
It was this insight that revolutionised the British tech industry, fuelled Autonomy’s rise and led to comparisons with Bill Gates.
His lawyers said: ‘HP has sought to blame Autonomy for its own crippling errors and has falsely accused Mike Lynch to cover its own tracks. Mr Lynch will not be a scapegoat for their failures. He has done nothing wrong and will vigorously defend the charges against him.’
Mr Lynch is accused of ‘artificially inflating’ revenues at Autonomy and making ‘false and misleading statements’ to cover it up.
In 2012, it was clear the deal had turned toxic when HP wrote off three-quarters of the British firm’s value, accusing Mr Lynch and his colleagues of mismanagement.
The ensuing battles have pitted him against Meg Whitman, 62, the formidable HP boss, who stood down this year.
She has said HP did a ‘whole host’ of due diligence checks when it bought Autonomy to check for any hidden problem but that ‘when you’re lied to, it’s hard to find.’
Mr Lynch’s camp says HP has a track record of terrible takeovers that have gone badly wrong, costing its largely American investors billions of dollars.
His defenders also argue the dispute boils down to nothing more than differences in US and UK accounting standards and is not a criminal matter.
Mr Lynch is also fighting HP Enterprise, a successor of HP, in a civil suit in this country filed in 2015.
It claims Autonomy wrongly booked £8.3million of revenues relating to a project to digitise the Vatican Library in 2010.
The US company filed a claim for $5.1billion dollars and Mr Lynch has counter-sued for $150million – for damage to his reputation.
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News Pictures Tech billionaire dubbed 'Britain's answer to Bill Gates' charged with fraud
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Hayden Panettiere
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kim cattrall
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Age: 52
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