UK Home Secretary approves extradition of Autonomy founder Mike Lynch to US

British Home Secretary Priti Patel has agreed to extradite technology mogul Mike Lynch to the United States, to face criminal fraud charges.

The decision comes after Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, lost a case involving multibillion-dollar fraud in London on Friday.

His company was sold to Hewlett-Packard HPAmerican giant for $11 billion in 2011.

He is accused of manipulating his accounts to inflate the value of the company before selling it.

And in 2012, just over a year after the purchase, it announced HP for a writedown of $8.8 billion in the value of Autonomy.

and raised HP A lawsuit against the founder Autonomy and its former CFO, Sushovan Hussain, to recover about $5 billion, claiming they “artificially inflated Autonomy’s reported revenue, revenue growth and gross margins”.

Judge Hildyard said that the company HP It has “won the case in a big way”, more than two years after the start of what is believed to be Britain’s largest civil trial, which took place over nine months in 2019.

But he said the company was likely to receive “significantly less” than the amount claimed in compensation.

Lynch denied the charges and said on Friday he would appeal.

Former CFO Hussain was convicted in April 2018 in the United States for electronic fraud and other crimes related to the sale of Autonomy, and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Friday’s decision by the British court coincided with a deadline for the home secretary to decide whether or not the tech entrepreneur should be extradited to the United States to face criminal trial on 14 counts of conspiracy and fraud.

A Home Office spokesperson said, “Under the 2003 Extradition Act, the Home Secretary must sign an extradition order if there are no reasons why the order should not be issued. Extradition requests are only sent to the Home Secretary once a judge has decided whether to proceed after considering various aspects of the matter. the case”.

“On January 28, after consideration by the courts, an extradition order was issued for Dr. Michael Lynch to the United States,” the spokesman said.

“Dr. Lynch vigorously denies the charges against him in the United States and will continue to fight to prove his innocence,” Kelwyn Nichols of Clifford Chance, the law firm, which represents Lynch, said in a statement Friday night.

“He is a British citizen who was running a British company in Britain subject to British laws and rules and this is where the matter should be resolved. This is not the end of the battle.”

The lawyer also confirmed that Lynch will appeal to the High Court in London.

The company was founded in 1996 by Lynch, from a specialist software research group called Cambridge Neurodynamics.

Autonomy has developed software that can extract useful information from “unstructured” sources such as phone calls, emails or video.

The software can then do things like suggest answers to a call center operator, or monitor TV channels for words or topics.

The company listed the US Nasdaq Stock Exchange in May 2000 at the height of the technology boom and was listed in London six months later.

The company suffered when it exited the FTSE 100 and was forced to issue an earnings warning in 2001.

But it grew rapidly and opened joint head offices in Cambridge and San Francisco, with others around the world, to serve 65,000 corporate clients.

Autonomy was sold to HP For $11 billion in 2011. Lynch left the company in 2012.

Lynch, a 56-year-old Cambridge graduate, created Autonomy to become one of Britain’s top 100 public companies.

In 2006, he was awarded the Order of the Order of the British Empire for his services to Britain’s business sector.

Lynch, a fellow of the Royal Society, who lives in Suffolk, has advised the British government and was on the boards of the British Library and the BBC.