Fate can even make fun of metaphors. And if the life of Mike Lynch (Ilford, 59 years old) was a whirlwind of business success, enormous enrichment, political popularity, a fall from grace, a humiliating extradition to the United States and a long legal battle – he managed to survive all of them – death surprised him when a real tornado sank his yacht off the coast of Sicily. His body was recovered on Thursday, four days after the accident.
At the end of July, the founder of the British company software for companies Autonomy posed in the living room of her house, in the wealthy London neighborhood of Chelsea, for the newspaper Sunday Times. He flashed a distrustful smile at the camera, a month and a half after a California jury acquitted him of 15 charges of fraud, falsification of accounts and conspiracy to commit a crime. Lynch, handed over by the British government to the US authorities in May last year, spent 13 months in San Francisco under house arrest, accompanied by his dog Faucet, a Shetland sheepdog, and the federal police who guarded him.
After spending 27 million euros on lawyers, facing a 12-week trial, and even taking the risk of taking the stand and answering prosecutors’ questions, on June 6 Lynch heard the magic words from the jury spokesperson: “Not guilty.” The officers accompanying him left, after disconnecting the electronic monitoring bracelet attached to his ankle. The judicial authorities returned the 90 million euro bail he posted to guarantee he would not try to escape. “When you hear that verdict, it’s like you’ve jumped into another dimension,” the businessman explained during the interview with the Times“If all this had gone wrong, it would have meant the end of my life.” He faced a request for a 25-year prison sentence.
The battle against HP
Stories of personal achievement are as bright as they are dark. The same son of Irish immigrants in England, whose first job was cleaning hospital floors until he won a scholarship at Cambridge University, can also be the “brusque and dictatorial” executive with his employees “who always expects things to be done his way,” as a judge at the High Court of London described him.
Lynch specialized in signal processing at university, a way of detecting specific patterns in vast amounts of electronic data. The first steps that would lead to today’s sophisticated search and artificial intelligence systems. In 1996, he launched his company Autonomy. Fifteen years later, it was the technology company with the largest market capitalization in London. It employed 2,000 people across 20 countries. They hired their softwareclients such as AT&T, BNP Paribas and the investment fund BlackRock.
Knowing what’s happening outside means understanding what’s going to happen inside, so don’t miss anything.
KEEP READING
The UK, already a deindustrialised and service-focused country, needed its own national hero for the new technological revolution and found one in Lynch, dubbed the “British Bill Gates”. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron appointed the popular entrepreneur to his Science and Technology Council, the BBC added him to its board as a non-executive director and in 2006 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his contribution to the advancement of British industry.
The success of a newcomer is sometimes the lifeline to which a foundering company clings. In the United States, the computer and printer company Hewlett Packard (HP), which always claimed to be the true embryo of the Silicon Valley miracle from a garage in Palo Alto, had become a dinosaur by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, whose products could not compete with Apple’s McBooks, AirBooks, iPhones and iPads.
Its CEO, German Leo Apotheker, saw the heavens open at Lynch’s company. HP would regain its glory with a turnaround in the business. He would sell softwarefor companies. The company acquired Autonomy in 2011 for 11.7 billion dollars (10.5 billion euros), an amount that included an exorbitant 64% mark-up on the real price of the company. The British businessman, then the father of two girls aged nine and six, became overnight one of the richest men in the United Kingdom.
HP’s shareholders and investors, however, rejected the acquisition out of hand. They fired Apotheker just five weeks after the announcement, and replaced him with Meg Whitman, a queen of the new technological economy of that era, who had just failed in her personal bid to become governor of California. She had spent $140 million (€125 million) of her own money on the campaign. She was hungry for success and had few scruples.
A year after the purchase, Whitman ordered an $8.8 billion (€7.9 billion) write-down of HP and launched a legal battle against Lynch and the British and American courts. She accused him of falsifying accounts and of having inflated the value of Autonomy at the time of the sale by $5 billion (€4.5 billion).
The “plant that is not watered well”
HP’s legal team and US prosecutors described, through millions of documents, dubious practices in Lynch’s management. Such as paying for certain services to companies to which he then sold his software. That is, a way to inflate the business and give it a healthier appearance than the real one, according to the accusation. The British businessman always maintained his innocence, and accused HP of getting angry because of a poorly paid and poorly managed purchase. “Dad gave a plant to a person, and that person did not water it properly. That is why it died, and now they want to blame dad,” Lynch explained to his then six-year-old daughter, as he recounted in the recent interview with the company. Sunday Times.
That version was not believed in 2022 by a judge of the High Court of England and Wales, who, faced with the situation that he himself wrote in the sentence – “Large-scale fraud or endless witch hunt?”, he asked himself – and chose to condemn Lynch and his financial director, Sushovan Hussain. The then British Minister of the Interior, Priti Patel, then took the extreme decision of extraditing the businessman, a British citizen, to the United States.
The chances of an American jury acquitting him were less than 1%. Even smaller were the chances that Lynch would end up dead, at the end of this long story, at the bottom of the Mediterranean, just as he was celebrating his resurrection.
Follow all the international information atFacebook andXor inour weekly newsletter.
