2023-05-12 15:16:41
British businessman Mike Lynch “was extradited to the United States” on Thursday, May 11. He will be judged there in a vast case of fraud linked to the sale of Autonomy software to the HP group. “After a lengthy extradition process in the United Kingdom, defendant Michael Richard Lynch has finally arrived in our territory to stand trial,” add documents filed in Federal Court for the Northern District of California dated Thursday and received Friday by Agence France press (AFP).
These documents also indicate that he will have to pay a bond of 100 million dollars (about 90 million euros) to be released since he is considered to present a “serious risk of absconding”. He will have to reside in or around San Francisco and be guarded at all times by a security company, specify the conditions for release on bail described in the document.
A spokesperson for Richard Lynch declined to comment. The businessman had lost an appeal before the British courts against his extradition to the United States on April 21. He is accused of a multi-billion dollar fraud in the sale of the British software publisher Autonomy to the American group Hewlett Packard (HP) for more than 11 billion dollars in 2011 (about 10 billion euros). The procedure has a civil component in the United Kingdom as well as a criminal component in the United States. The British government had signed in this context, in January 2022, an order for the extradition of Mike Lynch.
The concern of British business circles
A year after the transaction in question in this case, HP had accused Autonomy of having rigged its accounts after discovering what the American group presents as “significant accounting irregularities”. HP blamed former Autonomy chief executive Mike Lynch and the company’s former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain, among others, for artificially inflating the company’s reported revenues, revenue growth and margins. .
The American group had then spent almost 9 billion dollars (about 8.1 billion euros) in depreciations, of which more than 5 billion (about 3.9 billion euros) presented as the result of accounting manipulations perpetrated within ‘Autonomy before the transaction.
HP claimed from the High Court of Justice in London, the British capital, a reimbursement of these 5 billion dollars to the two former leaders of Autonomy. Sushovan Hussain has already been sentenced to prison in the United States and imprisoned. Mike Lynch, originally from Suffolk in the east of England, denies all the charges against him. The court documents describe “substantial evidence”. Lynch’s legal problems have also weighed for months on the British artificial intelligence and computer security company Darktrace, in which he is an early investor.
The possibility of Mike Lynch’s extradition had caused a stir in the British business community, with several prominent business leaders signing a joint letter to the government in February stressing, according to the British press, that a treaty of he extradition “proclaimed shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001 to enable the prosecution of terrorists was used to settle a commercial dispute which was already being examined by the British courts”. The signatories spoke of a “very worrying precedent for anyone running a business in the UK”.
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