British tech magnate Mike Lynch acquitted of fraud charges in $11 billion deal with Hewlett Packard
abcnews.go.comBritish tech magnate Mike Lynch has been cleared of charges alleging he orchestrated a fraud and conspiracy leading up to an $11 billion deal that turned into a costly albatross for Silicon Valley pioneer Hewlett Packard
SAN FRANCISCO — Mike Lynch, once hailed as Britain’s king of technology, has been cleared of charges alleging he orchestrated a fraud and conspiracy leading up to an $11 billion deal that turned into a costly albatross for Silicon Valley pioneer Hewlett Packard.
The not-guilty verdicts reached Thursday by a federal court jury in San Francisco followed an 11-week criminal trial that delved into the history of HP’s 2011 acquisition of Autonomy, a business software that Lynch founded and then oversaw as CEO in Britain. HP at first celebrated the purchase as a huge coup that would propel the Palo Alto, California, company down a promising new path, but then quickly came to regret under its then-CEO Meg Whitman.
The jury acquitted Lynch on all 15 felony counts facing him. Toward the end of the trial, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer threw out a count of securities fraud included in the U.S. Justice Department case against him in an indictment dating back to 2018. It took years to extradite Lynch from the U.K. and then more legal wrangling before the trial finally began in mid-March.
Lynch, 58, had been free on $100 million bail. Being accused of a massive fraud represented a dramatic turn in fortune for an entrepreneur once described as the Bill Gates of Britain — a title he seemed to live up to when he negotiated the Autonomy sale that generated a more than $800 million windfall for him.
The acquittal vindicates Lynch, who spent years fiercely denying he did anything wrong, while painting HP as a
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