Good morning. The superyacht tragedy last week that took the life of Mike Lynch, a tech millionaire known as the “British Bill Gates,” puts a spotlight on a case that underscores the important role of CFOs in ethical accounting. The finance chief who ran Lynch's firm Autonomy recently finished serving a five-year U.S. prison sentence and was banned from the industry for almost 15 years.
Autonomy is a software firm that Lynch founded in 1996. The company soared in valuation in the 15 years following its creation, leading to its acquisition by California-based Hewlett-Packard for $11.7 billion in 2011, Fortune reported. Within a year of the acquisition, HP said it had uncovered "accounting improprieties” and "outright misrepresentations" that occurred before it acquired Autonomy. HP wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion. (Hewlett Packard split in 2015 into HP Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprises, “both of which have become nimbler, more focused, and more successful companies,” Fortune’s Diane Brady writes in CEO Daily.)
