Mike Lynch, the tech tycoon who died when his luxury yacht sank off Sicily, spent more than a decade building Britain's biggest software company and almost as long again fighting charges he had inflated its value to secure a multi-billion-pound sale. Lynch's body was retrieved on Thursday from the wreck of Monday's disaster, a senior Italian official said. Lynch founded Autonomy in 1996 from his ground-breaking research at Cambridge University, and was lauded by shareholders, business leaders and politicians when he sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion 15 years later.
But in late 2012, HP stunned Wall Street and the City of London by saying it had discovered a massive accounting scandal. Lynch denied the charges. HP wrote off $8.
8 billion of value and triggered 12 years of legal battles in courtrooms from London to San Francisco. Lynch was known for his formidable intelligence, turning his cutting-edge academic research into a multi-billion pound tech business and becoming known as Britain's Bill Gates. He did not shy away from clashing with critics of his company - including on one occasion Oracle's Larry Ellison - and took a central role in building his defence.
(Unravel the complexities of our digital world on The Interface podcast , where business leaders and scientists share insights that shape tomorrow’s innovation. The Interface is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.) He hired the biggest names in Britain's legal and corporate communications .