Is Britain's Bill Gates about to spend 25 years in a U.S. prison cell? Mike ... trends now
The first computing breakthrough made by Mike Lynch was a program that allowed law enforcement to instantly match suspects’ fingerprints to records on their database.
Back in the early 1990s, it would have been hard to believe that the tech genius hailed as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates, who would later become an adviser to David Cameron’s government and also sit on the board of the BBC, would one day have his own fingerprints taken.
But, in a titanic fall from grace that has seen the 58-year-old tycoon spend much of the past year living under house arrest with an electronic tag attached to his ankle, Lynch will today enter a San Francisco courtroom to defend himself against fraud and conspiracy charges that could see him imprisoned for decades.
Fighting his corner will be a legal team led by Reid Weingarten, one of the American legal system’s most successful white-collar defenders, whose client list has included such notorious characters as the film director Roman Polanski, who fled the U.S. in the late 1970s after admitting statutory rape of a minor, and the late serial paedophile and friend of Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein.
A past master at representing the rich and famous, Weingarten has said he sometimes feels he is in the French Revolution, ‘defending the nobility against the howling mob’.
Mike Lynch on his Suffolk farm when he was fighting extradition
A string of heavily-hyped Silicon Valley entrepreneurs – from Elizabeth Holmes of the blood-testing Theranos venture to cryptocurrency ‘guru’ Sam Bankman-Fried – have in recent years been exposed as shameless frauds.
Infected by the tech industry mantra to ‘Fake it till you make it’, they have ended up in prison after being caught out wildly exaggerating their business achievements.
Mike Lynch OBE was similarly lauded as having the Midas touch, and the bluff Essex boy, a 007 obsessive who looks rather like a Bond villain himself, became a leading light in a UK tech industry that has thrown up few genuinely global figures.
He now faces up to 25 years in a U.S. prison if found guilty of 17 counts of conspiracy, and securities and wire fraud.
The charges relate to the business deal that was hailed at the time as his crowning glory – the £8.6 billion sale of his software and data company Autonomy to U.S. computer giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.
Lynch, who personally made more than £500million from the deal, became one of Britain’s richest people and everyone wanted to hear his advice on how to get ahead in business.
But the glitter rapidly faded when HP wrote down three-quarters of the value of Autonomy only a year after buying it, sacking Lynch and accusing him and other executives of having grossly inflated its size and profits during the sale.
Lynch, along with former Autonomy vice president of finance, Stephen Chamberlain, deny the charges, but will face an uphill task in proving their innocence in the face of formidable U.S. federal prosecutors, who rarely lose such cases.
It doesn’t help that Lynch has already lost a 2019 civil fraud case based on similar allegations that HP – now Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) – brought in the UK. The High Court ruled in 2020 that HPE had ‘substantially won’ its case.
His separate three-year battle to avoid being extradited to face criminal charges culminated in Lynch going to the High Court to argue that American prosecutors were guilty of legal overreach which threatened UK sovereignty and its citizens.
His plea was rejected and, last May, he was flown to California, accompanied by the U.S. Marshals Service, still loudly protesting his innocence.
The trial that starts today will be held in front of a jury in a city just 30 miles from HPE’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.
At least the trial will get him out of the house. After prosecutors convinced a judge that Lynch was a serious flight risk, he was forced to post $100million (£78 million) bail, surrender his passport and agree to house arrest.
Mike earned a PhD in mathematical computing and started his first company in the late 1980s with just £2,000
Consequently, for the past 11 months, Lynch has been largely restricted to a £27,000-per-month rented house in the smart Pacific Heights neighbourhood, with video cameras scanning every room 24-hours a day, and that GPS tracking bracelet on his ankle.
The judge overseeing his trial slightly relaxed his confinement conditions recently, allowing him outdoors between the hours of 9am and 9pm, but only if he is
