LONDON — British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges in June in a landmark trial over allegations made by Hewlett Packard that he had artificially inflated the value of his company when he sold it to the U.S. enterprise tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.
Just two months after his acquittal, Lynch — who was once lauded by the U.K. national press as “Britain’s Bill Gates” — was reported missing Monday after the sinking of a superyacht off the coast of Sicily.
The yacht, called the Bayesian, capsized at around 4 a.m. local time while anchored off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village located in the province of Palermo in Italy. It was struck by an unexpectedly violent storm, according to local media reports.
Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, is among the 15 people who were rescued after the yacht’s collapse. At least one man has died, while six people — including Lynch’s daughter Hannah — remain unaccounted for, officials have said.
Sicily’s civil protection agency told reporters late Monday that Morgan Stanley International chairman, Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy, and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo are also missing.
In a separate incident Saturday, Stephen Chamberlain, the former vice president of finance at Autonomy and a co-defendant in Lynch’s trial, died after being “fatally struck” by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire, Chamberlain’s lawyer told Reuters news agency.
Who is Mike Lynch?
Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy. He also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups, which he founded in 2012.
He became the target of a protracted legal battle with Hewlett Packard after the technology firm accused Lynch of inflating Autonomy’s value in an $11.7 billion sale. HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on the value of Autonomy within a year of buying it.
Lynch was extradited from Britain to the U.S. last year to stand trial over the HP allegations. He faced criminal charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly scheming to inflate Autonomy’s revenue starting in 2009 in a bid to entice a buyer.
But two months ago, Lynch, who has long denied the accusations, was acquitted of fraud charges in a surprise victory following the trial, which lasted for three months.
During the trial, Lynch took the stand in his own defense, denying wrongdoing and telling jurors that HP botched Autonomy’s integration.
Prosecutors had alleged Lynch, along with Autonomy’s now-deceased finance executive Chamberlain, padded Autonomy’s finances in a number of ways.
These included back-dated agreements and so-called “round-tripping” deals that sought to artificially inflate Autonomy’s sales by fronting cash cash to customers through fake contracts.
Lynch told jurors that he was focused on technology-related matters at Autonomy and left accounting and money decisions to the company’s then-chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain.
Hussain was separately convicted in the U.S. in 2018 on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud related to the HP deal. He was released from prison in January after serving a five-year sentence.
‘Britain’s Bill Gates’
Lynch was born in Ilford, a large town in East London, in 1965 and grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex.
He attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences, focusing on areas including electronics, mathematics and biology. After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch completed a Ph.D. in signals processing and communications.
Toward the end of the 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd., a firm which produced designs and audio products for the music industry.
A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition business called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted the South Yorkshire Police among its customers.
But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he co-founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spinoff from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company scaled into one of Britain’s biggest tech firms.
Lynch held a lot of influence in the U.K. technology sphere at the height of his success, having once been dubbed Britain’s Bill Gates by the media.
He was previously on the board of U.K. broadcaster BBC. He also once served as an advisor to the British government on the Council for Science and Technology.
In his role as head of venture firm Invoke, Lynch was closely involved in helping British cybersecurity firm Darktrace and legal software startup Luminance get off the ground, backing both firms with sizable sums of cash.
Publicly-listed Darktrace, which had fended off similar allegations of inflating its revenues by U.S. short seller Quintessential Capital Management (QCM), earlier this year agreed a deal to bought out and taken private by U.S. private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion in cash.
Lynch previously made the Forbes’ billionaires list in 2014 and 2015, with an estimate net worth of $1 billion, according to the business news outlet. However, while facing legal costs in the dispute with HP, he dropped off the list in 2016.
Legal struggles aside, Lynch has several hobbies to keep him busy, including keeping and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.
“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn during an interview. “I have cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has kept since the medieval times and none of them have any Apple products whatsoever.”
Lynch reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk, a county in the East of England, to recover from his U.S. legal battle, the local East Anglian Times newspaper reported.
Weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch told The Times newspaper of how he feared dying in prison if found guilty over the HP allegations.
“‘If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense,” Lynch said in the interview with The Times.
“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life – the question is, what do you want to do with it?” he added.
