Former Autonomy chief govt Mike Lynch issued an announcement Thursday following his acquittal of felony prices, ending a 13-year authorized battle with Hewlett-Packard that grew to become certainly one of Silicon Valley’s largest fraud circumstances. He was accused of falsely inflating revenues on the UK startup forward of Autonomy’s $11 billion sale to HP in 2011.
Commenting on the acquittal, Lynch (pictured above, left, when he appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt) stated in his assertion: “I am elated with today’s verdict and grateful to the jury for their attention to the facts over the last ten weeks. My deepest thanks go to my legal team for their tireless work on my behalf. I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.”
After a 12-week trial, the entrepreneur was cleared of 15 counts of fraud and conspiracy that had been introduced towards him in relation to the 2011 acquisition.
The victory for Lynch is notable in mild of the truth that within the US, in fiscal 12 months 2022, solely 0.4% of federal felony circumstances led to trial and acquittal, in response to the Pew Research Center, and solely 12% of all wire fraud prosecutions resulted in acquittal.
Christopher Morvillo and Brian Heberlig, authorized counsel for Lynch, added in an announcement: “We are thrilled with the jury’s verdict, which reflects a resounding rejection of the government’s profound overreach in this case. The evidence presented at trial demonstrated conclusively that Mike Lynch is innocent. This verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP’s well-documented ineptitude on Dr Lynch. Thankfully, the truth has finally prevailed. We thank Dr Lynch for his trust throughout this ordeal and hope that he can now return home to England to resume his life and continue innovating.”
Lynch, 58, was beforehand extradited to the US, and put below home arrest and 24-hour surveillance forward of the trial. He lengthy maintained he was scapegoated by HP, claiming it botched the acquisition of Autonomy, and later mismanaged the corporate’s software program property.
Lynch made £500 million from the sale of Autonomy to HP. But solely a 12 months later, HP wrote down its funding by $8.Eight billion, saying $5 billion of that write-down owed to practices employed by Autonomy’s earlier administration staff that inflated Autonomy’s worth and misled potential consumers into believing the corporate was way more beneficial.
Prosecutors accused Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former vice chairman of finance, of illegally inflating revenues forward of the acquisition and hiding high-margin software program income inside unprofitable {hardware} gross sales.
In the trial, Lynch efficiently argued that he had not been concerned in accounting and contract issues, as an alternative specializing in technical and advertising and marketing points.
Although unsuccessfully arguing that the case ought to be heard within the UK, resulting in his extradition, the US jury exonerated Lynch on all counts, together with Chamberlain, who was additionally on trial.
The US legal professional’s workplace in San Francisco stated: “We acknowledge and respect the verdict. We would like to thank the jury for its attentiveness to the evidence the government presented in this case.”
Autonomy’s sale to HP was seen as a vindication of the UK’s booming tech scene, and the platform’s skill to sift via unstructured databases was, on the time, seen as a approach for HP to rebuild its flat-lining {hardware} enterprise.
Lynch co-founded Autonomy in 1996 out of a specialist software program analysis group known as Cambridge Neurodynamics.
Awarded an OBE for providers to enterprise in 2006, Lynch grew to become a UK authorities adviser who sat on the boards of the BBC and the British Library, based the Invoke Capital VC, and invested in breakout cyber safety firm Darktrace.
