(San Francisco) British businessman Mike Lynch was acquitted following his trial for fraud in San Francisco (California), relating to the sale of software publisher Autonomy to the American group Hewlett Packard (HP ) for $11 billion in 2011, media reports said Thursday.
A year after the acquisition, HP accused Autonomy of having rigged its accounts, citing “significant accounting irregularities”.
HP has accused Autonomy’s former CEO and former CFO Sushovan Hussain of artificially inflating the company’s reported revenue, revenue growth and margins.
The American group had to write down nearly $9 billion, including more than $5 billion presented as the result of accounting manipulations carried out within Autonomy before the transaction.
Originally from Suffolk, in the east of England, Mike Lynch had refuted all the charges against him. He had accused HP of making him a “scapegoat for its own failures.”
“I think Autonomy was a successful company. From a financial point of view, it was extremely profitable,” he insisted at the hearing on May 23, stressing that it was certainly “not perfect.”
“But the reality of life is that everything is nuanced and sometimes you do the best you can in the face of that, and companies do exactly the same,” he added.
He pocketed some $815 million from the sale.
HP also sued Autonomy’s former CFO, Sushovan Hussain. In 2018, a U.S. jury convicted him of fraud related to the sale, earning him a five-year prison sentence.
In 2022, British courts ruled that HP had been duped and paid too much. HP has requested from the High Court of Justice in London a reimbursement of 5 billion dollars from the two former executives of Autonomy.
Mike Lynch was extradited in 2023 from the United Kingdom to the United States to stand trial. The trial began on March 18.
American justice considered that he presented a “serious risk of flight”, he was placed under house arrest in San Francisco under the surveillance of a private security service at his expense, according to a legal document.