Mike Lynch, British businessman cleared in $11bn US fraud trial

British businessman Michael Lynch was cleared on all counts in a San Francisco court on Thursday. Lynch was charged with $11 billion in fraud related to the sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.

“We respect the verdict and thank the jury for its attentiveness to the evidence the government presented in this case,” US Attorney’s Office spokesman Abraham Simmons said, confirming the verdicts.

Mike Lynch, who made roughly $815 million from the 2011 sale, was accused of plotting to inflate the company’s worth in order to receive more money from HP.

Bloomberg reported Lynch was wiping his eyes after the verdict and that people in the courtroom were crying.

“I am elated with today’s verdict,” Mike Lynch said in a statement.

“I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.”

The verdict came after two days of deliberations and 11 weeks of a highly technical trial that included testimony by Lynch himself.

Just one year after the mega-deal, HP reported a write-down of $8.8 billion — including more than $5 billion it attributed to inflated data from Autonomy.

The Autonomy takeover led to the ouster of Leo Apotheker as HP chief executive in September 2011, and HP subsequently said it had discovered massive accounting irregularities.

Mike Lynch, who served as an advisor to two British prime ministers, has claimed HP is making him a scapegoat for the company’s failures when it came to acquisitions.

Defense attorneys Christopher Morvillo and Brian Heberlig touted the verdict as a resounding rejection of the US government’s case against Lynch.

“This verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP’s well-documented ineptitude on Dr. Lynch,” Morvillo and Heberlig said in response to an AFP inquiry.

An attorney for HP did not return a request for comment.

HP won a civil fraud case in Britain over the sale, with a High Court judge ruling in 2022 that it had been duped into overpaying.

HP sued two executives, Lynch and former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain, for around $5 billion.

A US court in 2018 convicted Hussain of fraud related to the sale and jailed him for five years.

Lynch, from Suffolk in eastern England, disputed all charges and denied any wrongdoing.

US prosecutors accused Lynch of wire fraud and securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit offenses involving years of falsified records.

Lynch was extradited to the United States from Britain to stand trial on the criminal charges, which could have put him in prison for as long as 25 years.

His legal jeopardy was diminished last week when the judge dismissed the most serious charge of securities fraud.