At the height of his career, Mike Lynch – once the UK’s leading tech entrepreneur, hailed as “Britain’s Bill Gates” – sold his software firm to a Silicon Valley giant in an $11bn (£8.6bn) deal. Last Monday, more than a dozen years later, that deal became the centrepiece of a trial in San Francisco.
Lynch has been charged with 16 counts of wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy by the US authorities, who claim that Hewlett-Packard’s troubled acquisition of Lynch’s Autonomy was built on lies. If convicted, he faces up to 25 years in jail. He has pleaded not guilty.
