SAN FRANCISCO – The criminal fraud circus kicks off today for Mike Lynch, the former ‘British Bill Gates’ now accused of pulling the wool over Hewlett-Packard’s eyes in a $11.1 billionbait-and-switch deal back in 2011.
The fallen tech tycoon, once lauded with honors like an Order of the British Empire, could face over two decades behind bars if convicted by a U.S. jury on 17 counts including wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy to commit felonies.
Prosecutors allege the 57-year-old pulled out all the tricks to inflate sales figures at his software firm Autonomy before gulling HP into the overpriced acquisition. The alleged fraud-laced tactics range from blatantly stuffing the firm’s software into computer innards without customers knowing, to strong-arming whistleblowers into silence.
Despite Lynch’s past glory days as a pioneering British software magnate, the former golden boy’s brilliance has been tarnished in recent years by his Florida facelift tan and sullen demeanor. He’s swapped plush corner offices for drab federal custody, forced to reside under $100 million bail bond house arrest with aConstantinianGreek chorus of armed guards monitoring his every move.
The only permitted staging area for Lynch these days is a tony San Francisco apartment, where he’s been confined wearing a government-issued ankle bracelet typically reserved for violent offenders. He was only recently permitted to ventureoutdoors between 9am-9pm under armed chaperone, perhaps to soak up some California sunshine before serious prison yard time.
While prosecutors try to cast Lynch as an unscrupulous charlatan, the defense claims he’s actually the naive victim of HP’s sour grapes. Lynch’s legal eagles are expected to argue the Silicon Valley computer titan simply suffered buyers remorse after failing to create value from the acquisition, forcing a multi-billion dollar write-down to save face rather than accept its own shortcomings.
The dueling titans paint a symbolic battle of Old England’s burgeoning tech aristocracy represented by Lynch, versus America’s fading computing industrial dominance embodied by HP’s past hardware heyday. Like many pre-internet relics, HP has fumbled adapting to new mobile and cloud paradigms.
Meanwhile, Lynch’s alleged infractions helping birth a revolutionary firm like Autonomy that pioneered gleaning insights from unstructured ‘big data’ show just how quickly the aging HP guardians of structured databases were left behind by lithe British upstarts.
Each side will likely present dueling narratives over whether Autonomy’s skyrocketing growth signaled legitimate breakthrough innovation justifying premium valuation, or perhaps fudged bookkeeping masking more pedestrian realities. Plot twists could range from cameos by marquee Silicon Valley players dissecting techy financial arcana, to legal inspection of intellectual property mobile apps and bleeding-edge big data algorithms.
Yet whatever the trial’s outcome, the final curtain will likely drop on this episode of British tech nobility run amok on the world stage. If Lynch beats the rap, the aging innovator would likely be too tarnished to orchestrate another momentous startup act.
But perhaps more probable, a conviction could finale Lynch’s storied career arc from UKtech wunderkind, to temporarily misunderstood mastermind vilified by bumbling HP management, before capping as asdisgraced convict stripped of accolades and possibly facing barbaric American prison realities.
No matter this potboiler’s dramatic conclusion, the saga seems fittingly operatic for a modern mogul who once cavalierly self-declared “software is the big game of the future.” Only playing fast and loose with that software’s value accounting details may prove Lynch overreached from tech visionary to villain.
