Mike Lynch, who has died after his yacht sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily on Monday, skilled a few of the most excessive profession highs and lows of any British know-how entrepreneur.
A self-made software program success story, Lynch went on to grow to be a distinguished investor in — and vociferous champion of — the UK tech start-up scene. The $11bn sale of his firm, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 was on the time the largest ever of a European IT concern, cementing his place because the uncommon head of a British tech firm to make it on the worldwide stage.
However a 12 months later HP claimed Autonomy’s leaders had fraudulently inflated the worth of the acquisition by $5bn, resulting in a 12-year authorized ordeal. Lynch misplaced an extended battle towards extradition to the US on fraud expenses and spent greater than a 12 months below home arrest in San Francisco forward of a trial. He was ultimately cleared by a jury on all expenses in June this 12 months.
The physique of Lynch, 59, was discovered on Thursday after the yacht Bayesian, which was registered in his spouse’s identify, sank in extreme climate early on Monday morning within the Mediterranean. His 18-year-old daughter Hannah, who was additionally on board, continues to be lacking, presumed lifeless.
Different passengers on Bayesian included members of Lynch’s authorized crew and a witness for the defence, who he had invited to have a good time his courtroom victory.
The lengthy journey that introduced Lynch to a 56-metre, luxurious “superyacht” started in humble circumstances.
Born in Ilford, Essex, and introduced up in close by Chelmsford, he appreciated to speak concerning the hardships he confronted throughout his upbringing. Taking the stand at this 12 months’s trial, he stated that being the son of Irish dad and mom made him one thing of an outsider, particularly through the political turbulence of the Seventies, when “there have been occasions you needed to study to run quick”.
He was awarded a scholarship to Bancroft’s, a non-public faculty in Woodford, Essex, however claimed to shun the trimmings of social standing. He advised the jury that his first job concerned mopping flooring in a neighborhood hospital, and stated: “As a 16-year previous . . . you realise that no matter it’s you wish to do, simply do it.”
Lynch went on to check pure sciences at Christ’s School, Cambridge college, and later accomplished a PhD in sign processing, specialising in a way utilized in fields similar to cellular communications to separate the sign from the noise in digital information. By the late Nineteen Eighties he had begun turning his experience to entrepreneurial use with a sequence of start-ups, starting with one which designed a tool used to pattern music.
He based Autonomy in 1996 simply as an explosion of digital information was beginning to engulf firms and different giant organisations, presenting enormous challenges in sorting by means of unstructured information, or data not held in simply searchable databases. The sale to HP confirmed Lynch’s success at carving out a globally recognised place in one of the crucial strategically necessary applied sciences of the time.
Nevertheless, HP boss Meg Whitman accused Autonomy’s leaders of getting falsely inflated the corporate’s revenues within the years earlier than the sale by means of methods similar to “spherical journey” offers, the place Autonomy paid clients in return for them shopping for its software program. Lynch threw himself into his defence within the years that adopted, turning the battle into a private vendetta towards Whitman, who he accused of inventing the fraud declare to cowl up her personal mismanagement of the foundering US tech firm.
Autonomy’s former chief monetary officer Sushovan Hussain was convicted of fraud over the Autonomy sale within the US in 2019 and HP gained a civil fraud declare towards Lynch within the UK in 2022. Regardless of these successes, US prosecutors stumbled when making an attempt to show that Lynch, as the corporate’s chief govt, was criminally accountable for the alleged fraud.
The jury was introduced with two very totally different variations of the software program boss. Prosecutors painted him as a domineering micromanager, whereas the defence depicted him as a big-picture tech strategist who didn’t take note of the advanced accounting points on the coronary heart of the fraud claims.
“I’m not an accountant . . . and I’m not a salesman,” Lynch stated, efficiently persuading the jury that he was not aware of the convoluted monetary dealings introduced in courtroom. “I’ve sat and watched a parade of witnesses that I’ve by no means met . . . and a sequence of transactions I had no involvement in, and never a lot else.”
Although he was finally cleared, the indictment within the US solid an extended shadow over Lynch’s profession. Together with a private fortune — he reaped greater than $800mn from his stake within the firm — Autonomy had earlier offered him with a platform to champion the reason for tech start-ups and take a distinguished position in public life.
Lynch served as a non-executive director of the BBC and a member of then prime minister David Cameron’s council for science and know-how, the place he suggested on the significance of the approaching wave of synthetic intelligence. He was granted an OBE in 2006 for providers to enterprise.
After expenses have been introduced within the US in 2018, he stepped again from lots of his public roles. Nevertheless, he continued to make investments by means of Invoke Capital, the enterprise capital agency he arrange after the sale to HP.
Not too long ago, in his first public feedback because the trial, Lynch advised The Sunday Occasions that he needed to supply help for individuals who had been wrongly convicted of crimes, and to struggle towards what he believed was the injustice of extraditions such because the one which had pressured him to face trial within the US.
He’s survived by his spouse, Angela Bacares, and a second daughter.
“The system can sweep people away,” he stated: “There must be a contrarian chance that’s saying, ‘Proper, properly, the entire world thinks you’re responsible however, truly, was {that a} truthful conviction?’”
