British businessman, Michael Lynch, accused of $11bn in fraud linked to the sale of his software firm, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard, was acquitted Thursday on all charges in a San Francisco court.
“We respect the verdict and thank the jury for its attentiveness to the evidence the government presented in this case,” US Attorney’s Office spokesman, Abraham Simmons, said, confirming the verdicts.
Lynch was charged with conspiring to artificially drive up the company’s value to get more money from HP in a transaction that earned him about $815m from the 2011 sale.
Bloomberg reported that Lynch was wiping his eyes after the verdict and that people in the courtroom were crying.
The verdict came after two days of deliberations and 11 weeks of a highly technical trial that included testimony by Lynch himself.
Just one year after the mega-deal, HP reported a write-down of $8.8 billion — including more than $5 billion it attributed to inflated data from Autonomy.
The Autonomy takeover led to the ouster of Leo Apotheker as HP chief executive in September 2011, and HP subsequently said it had discovered massive accounting irregularities.
Lynch, who served as an advisor to two British prime ministers, has claimed HP is making him a scapegoat for the company’s failures when it came to acquisitions.
HP won a civil fraud case in Britain over the sale, with a High Court judge ruling in 2022 that it had been duped into overpaying.
HP sued two executives, Lynch and former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain, for around $5 billion.
A US court in 2018 convicted Hussain of fraud related to the sale and jailed him for five years.
Lynch, from Suffolk in eastern England, disputed all charges and denied any wrongdoing.
US prosecutors accused Lynch of wire fraud securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit offenses involving years of falsified records.
Lynch was extradited to the United States from Britain to stand trial on the criminal charges, which could have put him in prison for as long as 25 years.
His legal jeopardy was diminished last week when the judge dismissed the most serious charge of securities fraud.
AFP