Autonomy founder Mike Lynch extradited to US
Mike Lynch, once one of Cambridge’s most successul entrepreneurs, was extradited to the US yesterday (May 11) and is now at a secure address in San Franciso awaiting trial on charges including fraud, which he denies.
The British technology tycoon Mike Lynch has been vigorously fighting extradition for the past four years. But last month he lost an appeal, bringing the career of one of the UK’s most successful technology tycoons to a juddering – and perhaps permanent – halt.
The case against Lynch is well known. After founding Autonomy in Cambridge in 1996, he supervised one of the region’s brightest-ever ascents to a giddying peak of corporate success. The software company appeared to have developed new ways to process – and monetise – human information and unstructured data. In 2000, when it was floated on the NASDAQ, Autonomy raised $124million of funding. In 2010 its revenue was $870m and it had 1,878 employees worldwide. In 2011 the company was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in a deal which valued the British company at $11.7bn. In 2012 Lynch left the company. That same year, HP took an $8.8bn writedown hit after claiming "serious accounting improprieties" and "outright misrepresentations" at Autonomy.
The writedowns continued until 2017 when HP offloaded Autonomy to Micro Focus. By then the claims and counterclaims had long since overtaken any notion that Autonomy was a business force to be reckoned with. In 2018 Autonomy's ex-CFO Sushovan Hussain was charged in the US and found guilty in of accounting fraud. He was allowed out on bail after his appeal raised a “substantial question over his conviction”, but Hussain's appeal failed in 2020: along with a five-year jail sentence, he was fined $5m.
Based on Hussain's evidence, Lynch was charged with fraud in November 2018. Lynch said he would contest extradition and that he “vigorously rejects all the allegations against him”.
A Home Office spokesman said: “On April 21, the High Court refused Dr Lynch’s permission to appeal his extradition. As a result, the normal 28-day statutory deadline for surrender to the US applies.
“Dr Lynch was extradited to the US on May 11.”
Last year, Hewlett-Packard won a six-year civil fraud suit against Lynch after the High Court ruled that he defrauded the firm by manipulating Autonomy’s accounts to inflate its valuation ahead of a takeover.
Then home secretary Priti Patel later approved the extradition of Lynch, who was also the founding investor of cybersecurity giant Darktrace.
Speaking on the BBC’s World At One programme, Conservative MP David Davis said Lynch was extradited because of a “dreadful” extradition treaty.
He said the treaty was drawn up after the 2001 jihadist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York with the intention of targeting terrorists, murderers and paedophiles. The MP added that two-thirds of people extradited from the UK to the US since had been targeted for “non-violent, mostly white collar crimes”.
All that will be little consolation to Mike Lynch, once dubbed ‘Britain’s Bill Gates’. His counsel at the bail hearing in the US said he is worth between $400m and $450m, but he faces up to 25 years in prison if he is found guilty of deliberately overstating the value of Autonomy to HP in the 2011 sale process.
