Who is Mike Lynch, UK tech entrepreneur missing in superyacht sinking?

LONDON — British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch was acquitted in June in a landmark trial over HP In 2011, he sold the company to an American corporate tech giant for $11.7 billion, artificially inflating the company's value.

Just two months after his acquittal, Lynch, once dubbed “Britain's Bill Gates” by British national media, disappeared on Monday after a superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily.

The yacht, named Bayesian, capsized near the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in the Italian province of Palermo, at about 4 a.m. local time. According to local media reports, it was hit by an unexpected and violent storm.

Lynch's wife, Angela Bacares, was one of 15 people rescued after the yacht collapsed. At least one man died and six people, including Lynch's daughter Hannah, are still missing, officials said.

Sicily's civil protection agency told reporters late Monday that Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy and Clifford Chance attorney Chris Movello Morvillo also disappeared.

In a separate incident on Saturday, Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy's former vice president of finance and a co-defendant in Lynch's trial, was “fatally hit” by a car while out for a run in Cambridgeshire, Chamberlain's lawyer said told Reuters.

Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software company Autonomy. He also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on supporting European technology startups, which he founded in 2012.

Lynch was the target of a protracted legal battle with HP after the technology company accused him of inflating Autonomy's value in an $11.7 billion sale. HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on Autonomy's value within a year of acquiring it.

Lynch was extradited to the United States from Britain last year to stand trial on the HP charges. He faces criminal charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy, for his alleged scheme beginning in 2009 to inflate Autonomy's revenue to attract buyers.

But two months ago, Lynch, who had long denied the charges, won a surprise victory and was acquitted of fraud charges after a trial that lasted three months.

During the trial, Lynch took the stand in his own defense, denying wrongdoing and telling jurors that HP botched the Autonomy integration.

Prosecutors allege that Lynch and Chamberlain, Autonomy's now-deceased financial chief, enriched Autonomy's finances in various ways.

These included backdating agreements and so-called “round trip” transactions, which attempted to artificially inflate Autonomy's sales by providing cash to customers through sham contracts.

Lynch told jurors that he focused on Autonomy's technology-related matters and left accounting and financial decisions to the company's then-CFO, Sushovan Hussain.

Hussein was convicted separately in the United States in 2018 of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud related to the HP deal. He was released from prison in January after serving a five-year sentence.

Lynch was born in 1965 in Ilford, a small town in east London, and grew up near Chelmsford, Essex, England.

He attended Cambridge University and studied natural sciences, focusing on electronics, mathematics and biology. After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch earned his Ph.D. in signal processing and communications.

In the late 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd., a company that produced design and audio products for the music industry.

A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint identification company called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which also counted South Yorkshire Police as a client.

But his big break came in 1996, when he co-founded Autonomy, a spin-off of Cambridge Neurodynamics, with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt. The company has grown to become one of the largest technology companies in the UK.

At the peak of his career, Lynch was very influential in the British technology community and was once called the British Bill Gates by the media.

He previously served on the board of directors of the British broadcaster BBC. He has also served as an advisor to the UK Government's Science and Technology Committee.

While serving as head of venture capital firm Invoke, Lynch was closely involved in helping get British cybersecurity company Darktrace and legal software start-up Luminance off the ground, providing both companies with substantial cash support.

Publicly traded Darktrace, which has fended off similar accusations by U.S. short-seller Quintessential Capital Management (QCM) of overstating its earnings, agreed earlier this year to be acquired and taken private by U.S. private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion in cash.

Lynch has previously made Forbes Billionaires List His net worth was estimated at $1 billion in 2014 and 2015, according to business news outlets. However, he withdrew from the list in 2016 as he faced legal costs in a dispute with HP.

In addition to his legal battles, Lynch has several hobbies that keep him busy, including raising and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.

“I raise rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn in an interview interview. “The cows I raise didn’t exist in the 1940s, the pigs haven’t been raised since the Middle Ages, and they don’t have any Apple products.”

Lynch has reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk County, eastern England, to recover from legal action in the United States, local residents According to the East Anglia Times.

Weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch told The Times he feared dying in prison if convicted on the HP charges.

“Had things gone the wrong way, my life would have been over, as I know it,” Lynch said in the statement. Interviewed by The Times.

“It's weird, but now you have a second life – the question is, what do you want to do with it?” he added.