Only weeks ago, tech tycoon Mike Lynch was under armed guard in San Francisco as he faced criminal charges arising from the $11 billion (€9.95 billion) sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.
Lynch was acquitted on all charges in June, ending a long legal saga that could have led to prison sentence of up to 20 years.
If that was the prelude to a summer of celebration, disaster struck on the early hours of Monday when a superyacht sank in a freak tornado off the coast of Sicily.
Lynch, whose wealth is estimated to be between €360 million and €400 million, is one of six people missing in rough seas after 15 people were picked up by rescuers. One person was confirmed dead.
Often described as Tipperary-born, Lynch told journalist Richard Curran that he was in fact born to Irish parents in England and raised in Ilford, Essex. His father, from Cork, was a fireman. His mother, from Co Tipperary, was a nurse. He is reputed to have spent childhood summer holidays in Carrick-on-Shannon.
Born in 1965, Lynch was a gifted student with an interest in the exploits of James Bond, the fictional spy. Aged 11, he won a scholarship to the private Bancroft’s School in Essex. He went to study science at Cambridge, taking a doctorate in mathematical computing and then a research fellowship. These were the seeds of a spectacular business career that led to great wealth but soon embroiled him in a legal battle that became Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud case.
He shot to fame via Autonomy, once feted as Britain’s biggest tech company. Autonomy’s “Big Data” software helped business clients to analyse troves of unstructured information. The much-disputed sale to HP followed a secret meeting in July 2011 in Deauville, the ritzy resort in Normandy.
The deal was struck the very next month, yielding Lynch an enormous fortune and plaudits as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, or Steve Jobs, the man behind Apple. He was given an OBE for services to enterprise, served as a non-executive director of the BBC and advised David Cameron when he was UK prime minister.
HP’s objective was to rebuild its struggling computer hardware business around software. But the deal quickly unravelled, setting in motion years of bitter corporate recriminations and conflict in the courts.
The transaction proved to be a disaster for HP. The US group wrote down its investment by $8.8 billion (€8 billion) next year, claiming $5 billion of the loss was attributable to what it cast as the fraudulent raising of Autonomy’s sales in years before the sale. Former Autonomy chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain served a five-year prison sentence in the US after he was found guilty of fraud over the deal.
For his part, Lynch always claimed he was used as a scapegoat by HP for its own botched acquisition and later mismanagement of Autonomy. By the time of his San Francisco trial, he faced 14 charges for conspiracy and fraud.
Despite being bailed on a $100 million bond, he was under house arrest and subject to 24-hour video surveillance. He had fought an unsuccessful battle against extradition from Britain for two years, arguing that any criminal charges should have been tried in the UK.
Although he walked free in June, the Autonomy affair has still not reached its conclusion. Lynch vowed to clear his name in separate civil proceedings in London against a High Court ruling in favour of HP. Two years ago, the judge in that case found he had duped HP into overpaying for Autonomy. HP is seeking as much as $4 billion from Mr Lynch.