UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch is set to be extradited to the US to face criminal charges over the sale of his Autonomy Corp. to Hewlett Packard after British courts closed the door on any future UK appeals.
(Bloomberg) — UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch is set to be extradited to the US to face criminal charges over the sale of his Autonomy Corp. to Hewlett Packard after British courts closed the door on any future UK appeals.
Lynch lost his bid to block his transfer to the US after the London judges refused permission to appeal. It comes after the British government approved the move in January 2022 and followed a separate court judgment that he was dishonest in the $11 billion sale of his company.
It’s a huge blow for Lynch, once one of the country’s most prominent tech businessmen, a former adviser to a prime minister and a big investor in other UK-listed firms such as Darktrace Plc. He’d sought to argue that the case belonged in Britain and could have been fully investigated by British authorities.
The legal saga began shortly after the 2011 sale of Lynch’s Autonomy to Hewlett Packard. A year after the sale, the Silicon Valley hardware giant wrote down the value of the deal by $8.8 billion.
“The decision by the High Court to refuse Mr. Lynch permission to appeal brings to an end the long running extradition proceedings,” said Edward Grange, an extradition lawyer at Corker Binning, which is not involved in the case. “It signifies the exhaustion of domestic remedies in the UK against the order for his extradition.”
Lynch has one last route of appeal through the European Court of Human Rights.
Lynch has won support from prominent Conservative Party politicians including David Davis, who say the extradition treaty between the countries is tilted in favor of the US.
But none of Lynch’s grounds of appeal were arguable, judges Clive Lewis and Julian Knowles wrote in a ruling Friday.
“The fact is that the loss was felt by HP, or its shareholders the majority of whom were based in the US,” the judges said.
“Dr. Lynch is very disappointed, but is reviewing the judgment and will continue to explore his options to appeal, including to the European Court of Human Rights,” a spokesman said. “The US legal overreach into the UK is a threat to the rights of all British citizens and the sovereignty of the UK.”
Lynch personally made $850 million from the sale of the firm he built into the UK’s second largest software company.
Lynch “is well-resourced in terms of lawyers, and they can be relied upon to take any conceivable point on his behalf,” the judges said. “We are not remotely convinced there is any risk of an unfair trial.”
–With assistance from Katharine Gemmell.
(Updates with personal fortune, Lynch made in 11th paragraph. A previous version of the story corrected to clarify that Autonomy was sold to Hewlett Packard.)
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