They came together to celebrate thirteen years, and disaster struck in 60 seconds.

“I am very pleased with today’s verdict and am grateful to the jury for their attention to the facts over the past 10 weeks.”

With the ruling, British tech mogul Mike Lynch admitted on June 6 of this year that a jury in San Francisco had acquitted him of multiple counts of fraud and other crimes.

And so it ended: His company, Autonomy, founded in 1996, was a development that made it possible to search internal company data, documents, and unstructured information, from emails to recorded phone conversations.

In 2011, Lynch sold the company to US conglomerate Hewlett-Packard for $11.1 billion. The deal seemed to confirm that Lynch, “Britain’s Bill Gates,” FRE, BOE, would become one of the most successful British tech moguls in history. Shortly after the sale, he founded venture capital firm Invoce Capital, which he used to invest in cybersecurity firm Darktrace and other tech companies.

However, it soon became clear that things were not going well for Autonomy.

Just five weeks after the deal was signed, the HP executive who signed the papers was fired. Lynch left the company less than a year later, and in 2012 HP reduced Autonomy's book value by $8.8 billion because it turned out that even before the sale, Autonomy had serious accounting irregularities, or that sellers had withheld important information, or that customers had not been properly informed.

Civil and criminal litigation

HP began seeking justice in both countries. The FBI and the US and UK stock exchanges also began investigating. First, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, which deals with serious fraud cases, announced in January 2015 that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the case.

But the Americans didn't leave it at that. A few months later, in March 2015, HP in England And they took him to the civil lawsuit. Lynch demanded $5 billion from him and his former CFO, Sushuvan Hussain. Lynch responded by saying he would then sue HP for £100 million for defamation and spreading bad news.

Not long after, in November 2016, as a result of an investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a U.S. grand jury indicted former CFO Hussain on multiple counts of fraud and securities fraud. The gist of the charge was that he artificially inflated Autonomy’s financial performance to attract potential buyers. In April 2018, the jury I found him guilty for him.

Given the peculiarities of the American legal system, it was not possible to know what kind of punishment he would receive until 2019 — eventually, anyway. He was sentenced to five years.which was issued in January of this year — meaning the CFO’s sentence was still pending when a US grand jury indicted the other main actor in the case, Lynch, in November 2018. But negotiations never began in Lynch’s absence, who was in England.

The turning point came in January 2022, when HP was in London. He won the civil suit.As a result, the British Home Secretary finally decided that Lynch could be extradited to America. In a civil trial ruling in London, the judge said that HP’s damages were far less than $5 billion and that it would have bought Autonomy anyway, but the truth was that the giant company had been tricked into paying far more than it should have. Independence.

Piranhas and James Bond Villains

So Lynch was flown to America, where he spent more than a year under house arrest and underwent a criminal trial there, which ended with his acquittal and the happy, free verdict mentioned at the beginning of Lynch's article. It was built onThe world is not as black and white as the US authorities try to portray it, it is complex. Running such a company is complex, with the leader delegating tasks, not having a bird’s eye view of everything, and Lynch is not the tough businessman they try to portray him as, as the lawyers suggested after the plaintiffs left. In the trial with the piranhas in the lobby of Autonomy’s headquarters, there was an entire aquarium, and the meeting rooms were named after James Bond villains. The third major argument of the defense was that HP was in such a hurry to close the deal that it did not do everything it could to properly vet Autonomy.