Mike Lynch estate and business partner must pay £700mn to HP Enterprise, court rules
Judgment over Autonomy sale comes a year after death of entrepreneur in yacht accident
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is owed more than £700mn over the US tech group’s ill-fated acquisition of Autonomy, the High Court in London has found, less than a year after the UK software company’s founder Mike Lynch died in a yacht accident.
In a long-awaited ruling on Tuesday, Mr Justice Hildyard determined the amount owed to HPE from Lynch’s estate and the late tech entrepreneur’s former business partner Sushovan Hussain. The judge had found in 2022 that Autonomy’s “true financial position and performance had not been properly and accurately disclosed”.
Lynch died aged 59 last year alongside his daughter and five others when his family’s yacht sank off the coast of Sicily. They had been celebrating his acquittal on US fraud charges related to Hewlett-Packard’s $11.7bn purchase of Autonomy. Fifteen people, including Lynch’s wife, survived.
HPE pressed ahead with a civil claim in England, with chief executive Antonio Neri describing it as a “difficult” decision but one that was “in the best interest of shareholders”.
HPE was formed out of the 2015 split of Hewlett-Packard. The company sued Lynch after a $8.8bn writedown on its 2011 acquisition of Autonomy, accusing him of falsely inflating the company’s revenues.