The tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch has been extradited to the US to face criminal fraud charges, where a court has ordered him to pay a $100m (£79m) bond and called in 24-hour armed guards to ensure he does not flee the country.
Lynch, a billionaire founder once lauded as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates, is facing allegations that he duped the US firm Hewlett-Packard into overpaying when it struck an $11bn deal for his software firm Autonomy in 2011. He denies any wrongdoing.
His arrival in San Francisco marks the end of a two-year battle to avoid extradition to the US, where he could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Lynch has always denied the allegations of wrongdoing. He was a founding investor in the cybersecurity firm Darktrace, was awarded an OBE for services to enterprise and previously served as a non-executive director of the BBC and an adviser to David Cameron when he was prime-minister.
Lynch was accompanied by the United States Marshals Service when he landed in California on Thursday, four years after originally being indicted, to face a court order granting bail and conditions on his release.
Charles Breyer, United States district judge, said that his years’ long fight against extradition, “vast wealth” and lack of “significant connections” to the US meant that “flight from prosecution appears to this court to be almost a certainty”.
At his bail hearing Lynch’s counsel said that he was worth $400m to $450m.
“Clearly, Lynch’s conduct signifies that he would rather be in the United Kingdom – or perhaps anywhere else – than in the United States facing these charges. Courts frequently find that defendants with such vast wealth present a substantial risk of flight.”
Breyer said that if he could he would have ordered immediate detention, but said under the US’s Bail Reform Act he had to assess if there were conditions of release that would ensure Lynch’s presence at trial.
The court released Lynch from custody with a number of conditions including a $100m bond, confinement to an address in San Francisco and a 24-hour security detail – “including video surveillance and armed guards” – that must be paid for by Lynch.
He had said he was considering a last-ditch appeal to the European court of human rights after the high court ruling in London last month.
“On 21 April, the high court refused Dr Lynch’s permission to appeal his extradition,” a spokesperson for the Home Office said. “As a result, the normal 28-day statutory deadline for surrender to the US applies. Dr Lynch was extradited to the US on 11 May.”
Last year, Hewlett-Packard won a six-year civil fraud case in the UK against Lynch after a high court judge ruled that he had defrauded HP by manipulating Autonomy’s accounts to inflate the value of the company.
The then home secretary, Priti Patel, subsequently approved the extradition of Lynch to face criminal trial in the US for 14 counts of conspiracy and fraud over claims that investors in HP lost billions because of his actions.
Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy’s former finance director, was jailed in 2019 for five years in the US after being found guilty of fraud relating to the same deal.
Legal experts had said that Lynch’s chances of succeeding in blocking the extradition by turning to the European court of human rights (ECHR) were low.
The criminal defence law firm Corker Binning said that only 8% of applications to the ECHR in such cases – seeking a Rule 39 order to stop the UK extradition until it has considered the case – were successful last year.
