- By Dearbail Jordan
- Business reporter, BBC News
British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch has been extradited to the US to face felony prices over the $11bn sale of his agency Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
Mr Lynch – as soon as dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates” after the Microsoft co-founder – will stand trial on prices together with fraud, which he denies.
He is accused of overinflating the worth of his software program agency when he bought it to HP in 2011.
The Home Office confirmed that Mr Lynch was extradited to the US on Thursday.
The 57-year-old businessman, who’s a founding investor within the UK cyber-security agency Darktrace, has lengthy fought makes an attempt by US prosecutors to face trial in America.
According to US courtroom paperwork, Mr Lynch has been ordered to pay bail of $100m with authorities claiming he’s a “critical danger of flight” following his years of preventing extradition.
He will probably be confined to an handle in San Francisco, guarded by non-public safety which he should pay for himself.
Mr Lynch’s web value is estimated to be between £988m and £1.1bn.
A courtroom submitting stated: “After prolonged extradition proceedings within the United Kingdom, Defendant Michael Richard Lynch has lastly landed on our shores to face trial, accompanied by the United States Marshals Service.”
The Home Office stated: “On 21 April, the High Court refused Dr Lynch’s permission to enchantment his extradition. As a outcome, the traditional 28-day statutory deadline for give up to the US applies.”
As a outcome, he was despatched to California on Thursday the place the trial will happen.
At the time of the sale in 2011, Autonomy was the UK’s greatest software program firm and it was the largest-ever takeover of a British expertise business.
HP was primarily generally known as a expertise {hardware} firm and shopping for Autonomy was aimed toward diversifying its business.
However, only a 12 months later, HP wrote down the worth of Autonomy by $8.8bn and claimed it had been duped into overpaying for the corporate.
HP, Mr Lynch and Autonomy’s former chief monetary officer Sushovan Hussain have been mired in litigation ever since.
Hussain was jailed for 5 years and fined hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in 2019 on 16 counts of fraud, securities fraud and different prices.
What is Autonomy?
The firm was based in 1996 by Mr Lynch out of a specialist software program analysis group known as Cambridge Neurodynamics.
Autonomy developed software program that might extract helpful info from “unstructured” sources comparable to phone-calls, emails or video.
The software program might then do issues comparable to recommend solutions to a call-centre operator or monitor TV channels for phrases or topics.
It gained a list on the US Nasdaq alternate in May 2000 on the peak of the expertise increase and was listed in London six months later.
The firm suffered when the expertise bubble burst, dropping out of the FTSE 100 and having to subject a revenue warning in 2001.
But it grew quickly and opened joint head places of work in Cambridge and San Francisco, with different places of work worldwide, to serve 65,000 buyer corporations.
Autonomy was bought to Hewlett-Packard for $11.1bn in 2011. Mr Lynch left the corporate in 2012.
Last 12 months, HP received a civil fraud case towards Mr Lynch and Hussain. The “unusually advanced” trial lasted 93 days and concerned hundreds of thousands of paperwork.
At the center of the case, based on Mr Justice Hildyard, was HP’s declare that “they have been essentially misled and are victims of fraud”.
Mr Lynch and Hussain’s defence was that HP’s declare was “‘manufactured’ to cowl and justify a change of company thoughts, and to forged them as scapegoats for what in actuality is purchaser’s regret coupled with administration failings”.
In the tip, Mr Justice Hildyard discovered the “claimants have considerably succeeded of their claims on this continuing”.
The BBC has contacted Mr Lynch’s funding agency Invoke Capital for remark.
