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Climbing to the top
Born to an Irish immigrant family and raised in London in the 1960s, Lynch had a modest upbringing but won a scholarship to the private Bancroft School when she was eleven.
He graduated from Cambridge University and went on to found the eponymous company Autonomy. Founded in 1996, the software company used sophisticated statistical analysis to help companies manage their data.
Autonomy grew rapidly and joined the ranks of major UK companies listed on the FTSE 100 index before being sold to HP for more than £8 billion in 2011.
Lynch used his wealth to become a founding investor in Darktrace, a FTSE 100 cybersecurity company, and set up venture capital firm Invoke Capital to back other startups. His successes once led to him being hailed as the “Britain’s Bill Gates.”
But for 13 years, Lynch has been dogged by allegations that his success was the result of fraud. HP wrote off a large chunk of Autonomy’s value shortly after it acquired it, accusing Lynch of overstating the company’s success to force it to pay too much.
In 2022, Lynch lost a US$5 billion (US$7.4 billion) civil fraud case against HP in the UK High Court over the sale, and was later charged with multiple counts of criminal fraud by the US government over his alleged role.
Against all odds
Last year, he was extradited from Britain to stand trial in a California court, where he faced up to 25 years in prison.
In the lead-up to the trial, the businessman spent months under house arrest under constant surveillance by an armed security team. Lynch was forced to wear a GPS device and was held on $100 million bail.
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Lynch had little hope of beating the charges against him, given the high conviction rate in such cases. The U.S. government had spent years and vast sums of money proving that Lynch was the mastermind of a scheme to artificially inflate Autonomy's revenues.
But on June 7, after an 11-and-a-half-week trial, Lynch was acquitted and walked out of court a free man — a remarkable moment of vindication for a tech mogul who had always denied any wrongdoing.
In a final twist, Lynch took to the witness stand to defend his record, denying that he was the “driving force” behind the complex fraud. He told the jury that while he was responsible for the technological vision, he was not involved in the finer details of the company’s accounting.
Lynch's high-stakes defense paid off, as the jury acquitted him after three days of deliberations. Moments after declaring him “not guilty” on each of the 15 charges, his wife rushed to embrace him.
“I am very pleased with the verdict today and grateful to the jury for their attention to the facts over the past 10 weeks,” Lynch said at the time.
“I would like to thank my legal team for their tireless work on my behalf. I look forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.”
After returning to the UK, Lynch was preparing to campaign against what he saw as a one-sided extradition treaty between Britain and the United States.
In 2023, he was led from his country home in handcuffs to a waiting plane and flown across the Atlantic after then-Home Secretary Priti Patel signed off on his extradition, despite the UK’s Serious Fraud Office having dropped a case against him years earlier.
“The regime is able to keep people away,” he said in a recent interview.
tragedy
Over the weekend, Lynch was on his personal yacht off the coast of Sicily. The boat is named after the branch of statistics that was the subject of Lynch’s doctoral thesis at Cambridge University.
In 2022, Lynch lost a $5 billion civil fraud case against HP in the UK High Court over the sale, and was later charged with multiple counts of criminal fraud by the US government over his alleged role.credit: Bloomberg
The 56-metre, 473-ton superyacht was built in 2008, and is said to have accommodated 12 guests and 10 crew, and had a top speed of 12 knots. Its registered owner is Lynch's wife, Pakaris.
On board with the couple were Charlotte Golonski, a partner at Envoque Capital, and her husband James Emsley. Others on board were said to include Lynch's business partners and legal advisers, as well as the ship's crew.
“She is…” Golonski, who was rescued from the ship with her husband and infant daughter, told the Italian news agency. Corriere della Sera The newspaper said they were “all guests of our president”, whom it described as “an extraordinary person”.
The ship is said to have travelled from the Aeolian Islands to Milazzo and Cefalù before arriving in Palermo.
The ship was said to have been hit by an unusual storm, described by a local fisherman as a hurricane. Italian coast guard helicopters reportedly rescued 15 passengers. Six people are still missing.
A local fisherman said Corriere della Sera“At about 3:55 we saw the hurricane. A quarter of an hour later we saw a missile 500 meters from the dock. At about 4:35 we went out to sea to help, but we only saw the remains of the ship floating.
“There were no men at sea. So we immediately called the port authority.”
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Lynch and Bakaris were parents to two daughters, aged 18 and 21, who were studying at Oxford University and Imperial College London respectively. His youngest daughter, Hannah, is believed to be among those missing after the luxury yacht sank.
His personal net worth was estimated at about $450 million ($668 million) by his American lawyers last year, although Bakaris owns a large portion of the couple's fortune.
Lynch owned a house in west London, but lived primarily on a farm in Suffolk, where he raised rare breeds of pigs and cows.
He had been suffering from health problems including lung disease for most of the past few years.
Last month, he told a newspaper in his first interview since his acquittal: “Now you have a second life. The question is: What do you want to do with it?”
Telegraph, London
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