‘Lynch mob’ mentality of UK government leaves nasty taste as tech tycoon walks free

Thirteen years after US hardware giant HP paid $11.1 billion for Autonomy, where Dr Lynch was CEO, he was facing the grim prospect of a potential 25 years in jail for alleged wire fraud.

Thankfully justice was done when a San Francisco jury cleared him of those charges on Thursday and hacked through the figurative ball and chain that held him under house arrest along with the added shackle of a $100 million personal bond around his neck.

Business Weekly has reported, since HP bought Autonomy in an attempt to bolt software excellence onto its hardware offering that it was a classic case of caveat emptor – buyer beware. HP simply messed up – as it did with two other contemporary acquisitions around that period.

The Tory government, which Dr Lynch once served with pride as an unpaid adviser on science & technology, was desperate for a trade deal with the White House. To much criticism from entrepreneurs and politicians it agreed to extradite Dr Lynch to face US justice.Britain still hasn’t got the trade deal.

David Cameron, to whom Dr Lynch was ‘scientific’ adviser and is now Foreign Secretary at least until the July 4 general election, has been silent on the abandonment of Dr Lynch.

For the record, Business Weekly has backed Dr Lynch’s protestations of innocence from Day One. The newspaper spoke to the Serious Fraud Office at the outset who told us there was “insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction” when Autonomy was sold to HP. It also specified that in other aspects of the investigation, it was closed in order to cede jurisdiction to the US.

Business Weekly subsequently discovered and reported – as did The Guardian newspaper which has been a beacon of scrupulously fair reporting in the matter – that the SFO was at the time using Autonomy software!

Then at some stage behind the scenes it was agreed by the UK Government that the SFO was happy to let the US Department of Justice investigate the sale if it wished.

I told a prominent New York newspaper who contacted me for background material before the trial started in March that Cambridge tech executives were disgusted that Dr Lynch had been extradited by the UK government despite protests long and loud from David Davis and colleagues.

Incidentally, the MP has just told the Guardian that the Mike Lynch case was “a fantastic correction of a miscarriage of justice which we have been fighting for a number of years.”

Business Weekly has always maintained that the UK and United States had very different ground rules for accounting. This disconnect was brought out in the recent trial.

HP paid millions of dollars to professional services firms to crawl over Autonomy’s books before splashing the cash and not one red flag was raised. No-one held a gun to HP’s head when it signed the deal.

For years there has been a human being and his nearest and dearest caught in this maelstrom of misadventure. So let me bring a touch of humanity to this sorry saga.

Last August Dr Lynch emailed me from San Francisco where he was under house arrest after being extradited from the UK and was confident his innocence would be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. He told me then: “I am now comfortably set up in a nice house in San Francisco with great views of the Golden Gate and the city. It has a charming little garden which is frequented by hummingbirds.

Now he is as free as one of those hummingbirds he so admired. We have been thanked for our steadfast support by members of Mike’s legal team and tech executives in Cambridge as Dr Lynch prepares for a homecoming to the UK.

And in writing a caveat to this sorry chapter in UK government and business history allow me to add that Dr Lynch – through the VC company he founded, Invoke Capital – has backed to potential greatness such Cambridge businesses as Darktrace, Featurespace and Luminance.

In so doing he has championed the credentials of some brilliant woman executives, not least Poppy Gustafsson at Darktrace and Martina King at Featurespace.

Dr Lynch had been awarded an OBE in 2006, honoured at the Palace, and was elected as a Fellow to both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society – in 2008 and 2014, respectively.