Mike Lynch: What we know about the British tech tycoon missing in Sicily

Article content

Technology magnate Mike Lynch, one of six people missing from a sunken yacht off Sicily, had been trying to put behind him the Silicon Valley debacle that had tarnished his reputation as an icon of British ingenuity.

Lynch, 59, hit the jackpot when he sold the software maker Autonomy, which he founded in 1996, to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011. But the deal quickly became a burden for him after he was accused of falsifying the financial statements to facilitate the sale and was fired by then-HP CEO Meg Whitman.

Article content

He was acquitted of criminal charges in the US in June, but he still faces a potentially hefty bill from a civil case in London.

A ten-year legal battle ended with his extradition from the UK, where he was accused of planning a massive fraud against HP, a company that helped shape the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley after it was founded in a garage in Palo Alto, California in 1939.

Lynch has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing and claimed he was being made a scapegoat for HP’s own bungling – a position he maintained when testifying before a jury during a two-and-a-half-month trial in San Francisco earlier this year. U.S. Justice Department prosecutors called more than 30 witnesses to prove allegations that Lynch was guilty of accounting duplication and defrauded HP of billions of dollars.

The trial ended with Lynch being acquitted and he promised to return to the United Kingdom and seek new ways of innovation.

Although he avoided possible prison time, Lynch still faced the civil trial in London, which HP largely won in 2022. Damages in that case have not yet been determined, but HP is seeking $4 billion. Lynch earned more than $800 million from the sale of Autonomy.

Article content

Before joining HP, Lynch was widely hailed as a visionary who inspired descriptions that portrayed him as a British version of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Lynch, a Cambridge-educated mathematician, made his name running Autonomy, which developed a search engine that could sift through emails and other internal business documents to help companies find important information faster. Autonomy’s steady growth over its first decade earned Lynch one of Britain’s highest honors, the Office of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, in 2006.

In the months before the collapsed deal, HP valued Autonomy at $46 billion, according to evidence presented in the trial against Lynch.

The trial also painted different portraits of Lynch. Prosecutors painted him as an iron-fisted boss obsessed with hitting sales targets, even if it meant resorting to duplicity. His lawyers, on the other hand, portrayed him as an entrepreneur with integrity and a prototypical techie who enjoyed eating cold pizza late at night while thinking of new ways to innovate.

Visit our website for the latest breaking news, exclusive news briefs, long reads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and subscribe to our newsletters here.

Share this article on your social network