San Francisco: British businessman Michael Lynch, accused of fraud of $ 11 billion in connection with the sale of software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard, was acquitted of all charges in a San Francisco court.
“We respect the verdict and thank the jury for considering the government’s evidence in this case,” Abraham Simmons, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office, confirmed the verdict.
Lynch is accused of conspiring to artificially inflate the company’s value to get more money from HP in a deal that netted it about $815 million in 2011 sales.
Bloomberg reported that Lynch wiped her eyes after the verdict and people in the courtroom cried.
“I am pleased with today’s verdict,” Lynch said in a statement.
“I hope to return to England and return to what I love most: family and innovation in my field.”
The decision came after two days of deliberations and 11 weeks of technical testing conducted by Lynch himself.
A year after the mega deal, HP reported a decline of $8.8 billion, including more than $5 billion related to Autonomy’s inflation data.
The Autonomy takeover led to the ouster of Leo Apotheker as HP CEO in September 2011, and HP later said there had been serious accounting irregularities.
Lynch, who has served as an adviser to two British prime ministers, said he was to blame for the company’s failure to buy HP.
Defense attorneys Christopher Morvillo and Brian Heberlig said the verdict was a major rejection of the US government’s case against Lynch.
“This decision closes the book on HP’s 13-year effort to pin Dr. Lynch’s documented incompetence,” said Morvillo and Heberlig in response to an AFP investigation.
HP won a civil fraud case in the UK over sales, and a High Court judge ruled in 2022 that it had overcharged.
HP is suing two executives, Lynch and former chief financial officer Sushowan Hussain, for nearly $5 billion.
In 2018, a US court convicted Hussain of sales fraud and sentenced him to five years in prison.
Lynch, from Suffolk, eastern England, has denied all charges and denied any wrongdoing.
US prosecutors have charged Lynch with wire fraud and securities forgery and years of felony counts of falsified records.
Lynch was extradited from England to the United States to face criminal charges that carry up to 25 years in prison.
His legal threats eased last week when a judge dismissed the most serious fraud charges.
