Who is Mike Lynch, British tech entrepreneur missing in superyacht sinking?

LONDON – British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch was acquitted of fraud in June in a landmark trial over allegations of Hewlett Packard that he had artificially inflated the value of his company when he sold it to the US tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.

Just two months after his acquittal, Lynch – once hailed by the British national press as “the British Bill Gates” – was reported missing on Monday following the sinking of a superyacht off the coast of Sicily.

The yacht, named the Bayesian, capsized around 4 a.m. local time while anchored off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in Italy’s Palermo province. According to local media reports, it was hit by an unexpectedly heavy storm.

Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, is among 15 people rescued after the yacht collapsed. At least one man has died, while six people — including Lynch’s daughter Hannah — remain missing, officials said.

Sicilian Civil Protection Agency told reporters late on Monday that Jonathan Bloomer, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, his wife Judy, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda were also missing when difficult search and rescue efforts resumed on Tuesday.

In a separate incident Saturday, Stephen Chamberlain, the former vice president of finance at Autonomy and a co-defendant in Lynch’s trial, died after he was “fatally struck” by a car while running in Cambridgeshire, Chamberlain’s lawyer said. told Reuters news agency.

Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software company Autonomy. He also heads Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups, which he founded in 2012.

He became the target of a protracted legal battle with Hewlett Packard after the tech company accused Lynch of inflating Autonomy’s value through $11.7 billion in sales. HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on Autonomy’s value within a year of the purchase.

Lynch was extradited from Britain to the US last year to face trial on the HP charges. He faced criminal charges including wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly plotting to inflate Autonomy’s revenues starting in 2009 in an attempt to entice a buyer.

But two months ago, Lynch, who has long denied the allegations, was acquitted of fraud in a surprise victory after the three-month trial.

During the trial, Lynch took the stand in his own defense, denying wrongdoing and telling jurors that HP botched Autonomy’s integration.

Prosecutors had alleged that Lynch, along with Autonomy’s now-deceased chief financial officer Chamberlain, padded Autonomy’s finances in a number of ways.

These included outdated agreements and so-called ’round-tripping’ deals that aimed to artificially inflate Autonomy’s turnover by providing cash to customers through bogus contracts.

Lynch told jurors that at Autonomy he focused on technology-related matters and left accounting and money decisions to the company’s then chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain.

Hussain was separately convicted in the US in 2018 on charges of conspiracy, bank fraud and securities fraud in connection with the HP deal. He was released in January after serving a five-year prison sentence.

Lynch was born in 1965 in Ilford, a large town in East London, and grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex.

He attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences, focusing on areas such as electronics, mathematics and biology. After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch completed a Ph.D. in signal processing and communications.

Towards the end of the 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd. on, a company that produced designs and audio products for the music industry.

A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition company called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted South Yorkshire Police among its clients.

But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spin-off from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company grew into one of Britain’s largest technology companies.

Lynch had a great influence on the British technology world at the height of his success, after he was once dubbed the British Bill Gates by the media.

He previously served on the board of the British broadcaster BBC. He was also once an advisor to the British government on the Council for Science and Technology.

In his role as head of venture capital firm Invoke, Lynch was deeply involved in the launch of UK cybersecurity firm Darktrace and legal software startup Luminance, backing both companies with significant sums of money.

Listed Darktrace, which had dismissed similar allegations of inflating its earnings by US short seller Quintessential Capital Management (QCM), earlier this year agreed a deal to be bought out and privatized by US private equity firm Thoma Bravo for 5 $.32 billion in cash. .

Lynch previously made the Forbes’ Billionaires List in 2014 and 2015, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion, according to the business news outlet. Although he faced legal fees in the dispute with HP, he was delisted in 2016.

Aside from the legal battles, Lynch has several hobbies to keep him busy, including raising and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.

“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn during an interview interview. “I have cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has kept since the Middle Ages, and none of them have any Apple products.”

Lynch reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk, a county in eastern England, to recover from his American legal battle, the local This was reported by the East Anglian Times newspaper.

Weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch told The Times newspaper that he feared dying in prison if found guilty of HP’s charges.

“If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense,” Lynch told the newspaper. interview with De Tijd.

“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is: what do you want to do with it?” he added.