For years, the name of Mike Lynch was synonymous with allegations of corporate fraud on a massive scale, accusations of which he was finally acquitted just two months ago . After this week, his name will be forever tied to his tragic demise following a freak yachting accident at sea, less than a day after his colleague and co-defendant in the aforementioned legal action, 52-year-old Stephen Chamberlain, also died, bizarrely , after being hit by a car while out running near Cambridge. The conspiracy theorists’ tongues may wag in the wake of that double-calamity, and yet what else can it be seen as other than a horrific coincidence? Lynch (59) was renowned as one of the world’s foremost tech entrepreneurs — Europe’s answer to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and a true British rarity — a successful self-made tech millionaire.
He was born in Ilford, London, in 1965 (some reports suggest he was actually born in Tipperary, where he had strong family connections), the son of immigrant parents — his mother a native of Carrick-On-Suir, his father a firefighter from Cork. Throughout his life he was well-known for his interest in Carrick, having holidayed there repeatedly in his youth, and for helping it quietly on its way in terms of attracting foreign investment. Lynch’s prowess as a student was evident from an early age, winning a scholarship to Bancroft’s School as a teen before entering Cambridge University, from where he emerged in the early ’90s with a PhD in signal processing.
That expertise — signal processing is used to detect worthwhile or useful patterns in reams of content, from numbers data to sound files to distorted video — saw him launch Autonomy, the company for which he would become most-renowned, in 1996. Some 14 years later the company was worth billions and employed more than 2,000 people globally. Lynch, a jazz saxophonist and rare cattle enthusiast in his spare time, was a deal less pastoral in his corporate life.
Autonomy was ruthless in its ambition under his leadership. Alongside his work with his own company, Lynch worked as a UK government advisor on then prime minister David Cameron’s council for science and technology, a role he resigned from following his indictment in the US, along with multiple other board roles at a state level. In 2010, the company’s status as Britain’s most valuable tech export chimed with a sleeping giant in the form of US tech firm Hewlett-Packard.
In an era of fast-evolving smartphone technology HP, still majority reliant on the personal computer and printer markets, was stagnating and suffering. Its then CEO Leo Apotheker, under immense pressure, saw the acquisition of Autonomy (which itself had swallowed countless smaller companies on its way to the top) as a potential return to the summit — in one swoop pivoting HP’s business towards data analytics, a niche purpose-built for the modern tech world. It was a long-odds gamble.
And like many long-odds gambles, it went about as badly as it could have done. Just five weeks after paying $11bn for Autonomy in October 2011 — a deal so lucrative that Lynch as CEO was duty-bound by law to recommend it to his own people — HP’s share price plummeted, and Apotheker was unceremoniously fired. The deal had made Lynch — along with many of his senior executives — an exceptionally wealthy man personally, to the tune of more than €550m.
It was also however to cost him the best part of the next decade of his life in legal wrangles and an eventual trial on American soil. HP’s new chief executive Meg Whitman, a celebrity Republican tech millionaire who had recently suffered a catastrophic self-funded loss in the California gubernatorial election, took one look at the HP-Autonomy merger and said ‘no thanks’. Worse was to follow for Lynch, who had stayed on at the company to guide it through its new surroundings, when HP called foul at the state of Autonomy’s accounting — alleging that the books had been cooked, with the company’s overall value overstated by $5bn.
Over the next 10 years, Lynch and fellow executives Chamberlain and Autonomy’s chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain, fought a retreating battle, spending millions in the process, against a US Department of Justice investigation into Autonomy’s accounting practices. Eventually all three would go to trial in the US. Hussain went first and was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to five years in prison.
He returned to the UK last January. Despite those legal travails, Lynch’s corporate career continued apace. After the sale he founded venture capital concern Invoke Capital followed in 2016 by Darktrace, a cybersecurity company, eventually bringing Chamberlain on board with him there as CFO.
Lynch and Chamberlain were however eventually indicted in 2018 for conspiracy and wire fraud, with Lynch extradited from the UK to San Francisco in May 2023. He spent a year under house arrest before facing trial alongside Chamberlain last March. The significant delay from Hussain’s conviction until his own trial eventually, by Lynch’s own admission, proved beneficial to his cause — it allowed he and his legal team to gain sight of the strategies being used by the American prosecutors, strategies which were replicated in his own case.
Nevertheless, the odds of his being acquitted were miniscule — more than 99% of federal criminal trials in the US end in conviction. Had he been convicted, he likely would have faced a minimum of 15 years imprisonment. Lynch and Chamberlain were to prove the exceptions to the rule, their defensive plan to cast anything untoward in Autonomy’s books as being both beneath their station and also the likely result of the grey area existing between transatlantic interpretations of what constitutes corporate fraud and what doesn’t.
Lynch further bucked trends by testifying in his own defence, something defendants in such trials are generally discouraged from doing as it leaves them facing cross-examination. The gamble worked. The jury was convinced, and Chamberlain and Lynch finally walked free on June 6.
He subsequently described the experience as being of the “near death” variety. In a poignant interview with The Sunday Times in early July, Lynch said: “That is very much how I handled it. It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life.
The question is, what do you want to do with it?” Less than two months later both he and Chamberlain would be dead. Early last Monday morning, Lynch’s luxury superyacht, the €16.5m-valued Bayesian, was caught in a freak tornado-esque storm — one involving a water spout — while moored off the coast of Sicily and sank in moments.
Of 22 people on board, 15 escaped on a lifeboat including Lynch’s wife and business partner Angela Bacares. Lynch’s body was formally recovered on Thursday along with four others after a desperate multi-day rescue operation. The body of his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, who had been due to begin studying poetry at Oxford next year and who was also on board, was recovered yesterday (Lynch’s 21-year-old second daughter was not present on the yacht when it sunk).
The voyage had been a celebratory one in honour of Lynch’s acquittal. Its end could scarcely have been more tragic. Those confirmed dead included the yacht’s chef Recaldo Thomas and two couples — Morgan Stanley International bank chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, and Lynch’s lawyer in his US fraud case Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda.
Adding tragedy upon tragedy, and an element of the macabre, to those events came the news later the same day that Chamberlain had succumbed to the injuries he sustained after being hit by a car while out running two days previously. The 49-year-old female driver of the car that hit him remained at the scene and had been assisting the police with their inquiries. Ironically, the only place were Lynch was to face legal censure was in the UK, where a 93-day civil case taken by Hewlett Packard saw the UK High Court rule that he had in fact defrauded the company in 2022.
A ruling on the damages in that trial was due before the end of this year, with HP seeking $4bn in redress. Where the liability in that action ends up is one of the many unresolved strands of this particular saga, though Lynch had made it clear before his death both that he would be appealing and that his family’s personal wealth was strong enough to weather whatever the potential penalty might be. Reflecting on what he had been through in July, Lynch told T he Sunday Time s he hoped to dedicate time in the future to lobbying for changes to the extradition treaty in place between the US and the UK (his own extradition was rubberstamped in January 2022 by then Tory home secretary Priti Patel).
“It has to be wrong that a US prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England than the UK police do,” he said. Of his experience, he said he felt no anger, an emotion he described as “not fruitful”. “You just have to get on with dealing with the onslaught.
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