Obituary: Mike Lynch, British tech trailblazer who died at sea after US trial acquittal
22/08/2024 15:13
By Paul Sandle
LONDON, Aug 22 (Reuters) - 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, interior ministry official Massimo Mariani
told Reuters.
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.
He hired the biggest names in Britain's legal and corporate
communications professions, and invited some journalists into a
room filled with neatly stacked piles of company documents to be
briefed on its accounts.
HP had been drawn to Autonomy's ability to search and
organise unstructured information for clients, a killer
application in a world of unlimited data, before the emergence
of advanced artificial intelligence.
Lynch received about $800 million for his stake in Autonomy.
A NOD TO BAYES THEOREM
Autonomy's software used patented algorithms based on a
mathematical formula developed in the 18th Century by Reverend
Thomas Bayes. In a nod to the formula, Lynch had named his yacht
that sank off Italy the Bayesian.
HP pursued Lynch in a civil case in London's High Court for
$5 billion, with the entrepreneur spending 22 days in the
witness box, one of the longest cross examinations in the UK.
The U.S. firm won much of the case in 2022 after the judge found
that Lynch and a colleague had fraudulently concealed a "fire
sale" of hardware and engaged in convoluted reselling schemes to
mask a shortfall in sales of Autonomy's software, the business
HP coveted. Damages are still to be decided in the civil case.
Lynch then faced extradition to the U.S. on criminal charges
including wire fraud and conspiracy, where he could have faced
decades in jail if found guilty.
He took the stand in San Francisco in his own defence,
denying wrongdoing and telling jurors that HP had botched the
integration of its acquisition.
"Autonomy was an extremely successful company," he said.
Lynch was acquitted on all charges in June and freed after a
year under house arrest. He said he was "elated" and looking
forward to returning to his family and his estate in Suffolk,
England, where he had a herd of rare-breed cattle and many dogs.
As part of the celebration, Lynch invited those who had
supported him to join his family on his 56-metre (184-foot)
yacht for a sailing holiday around southern Italy. Guests
included his lawyer and a Morgan Stanley executive who had
appeared as a character witness.
The boat was at anchor, its sails down, when it was hit by a
violent storm before dawn on Monday and sank quickly.
His wife survived but on Thursday their younger daughter was
still missing, the last person unaccounted for after four other
bodies were recovered. The ship's chef was also found dead hours
after the disaster.
UK TECH CHAMPION
Lynch was born in 1965 and raised in Chelmsford near London.
He said his parents, a nurse and a fireman, instilled in him an
appreciation of the value of education.
At Cambridge University, he studied physics, mathematics and
biochemistry, and went on to research signal processing for his
doctorate. His thesis is still one of the most widely consulted
in the university's library, local media reports have said.
He founded Autonomy in 1996 and used some of the sale
proceeds to become a champion of UK tech. His venture capital
firm Invoke backed Darktrace, a British cybersecurity company in
the process of being sold to U.S. firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32
billion, and other tech businesses.
The married father of two daughters was keen to share his
expertise.
He advised the government on science and innovation, was on
the boards of the BBC and British Library, and was a fellow of
both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society.
After his acquittal, he vowed to campaign against the
extradition treaty between Britain and the United States, which
British critics have long called too one-sided, and he told the
BBC in August that he could not have been acquitted without the
money to fund his defence.
"You shouldn't need to have funds to protect yourself as a
British citizen", he said.
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FACTBOX-What we know about the sinking of the superyacht off
Sicily ID:nL8N3K70TA
NEWSMAKER-Mike Lynch, the UK tycoon who defeated US fraud
charges, missing at sea ID:nL8N3K6102
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(Editing by Kate Holton, Bernadette Baum and Sharon Singleton)
((mailto:kate.holton@thomsonreuters.com;))