Fifty-nine Year-old, Mike Lynch, British tech tycoon and Autonomy co-founder cleared of fraud after spending more than a decade fighting fraud accusations about making $516 million from selling his company, says he feared that he would die in prison. He could see his wife Angela,  daughters  who are now 21 and 18 return to his beloved  farm near Aldeburgh in Suffolk and greet his dogs Switch, Tappet, Pinion, Valve, Cam. Faucet was acquired to keep him company in San Francisco.

Autonomy was the most valuable tech firm in Britain, employing 2, 000 people across 20 countries, including  AT&T, BNP Paribas and BlackRock.  Lynch pulled off countless takeovers, gobbling up competitors and growing the business to number one valuable tech firm. Leo Apotheker, 57 year-old German CEO of HP saw salvation in Autonomy, and taken over the year before with a mandate to save a fading Silicon Valley giant.

Lynch, once known as “ Britain’s Bill Gates” was extradited to America last May spent 13 months under house arrest in California wearing ankle tag under the gaze of surveillance cameras that has been installed in every room of the San Francisco mansion to which he was confined, waiting for trail. The father of two was found not guilty in a San Francisco federal court last month on 15 counts of fraud and conspiracy he faced over the $11.7 billion (£7.4billion) purchase of his software company, Autonomy, by Hewlett-Packard in 2011. But within a year HP, which refers itself as Silicon Valley’s original start-up, founded in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939, claimed that he had cooked the books, and thus tricked it not paying $ 5 billion more than it should have for a company packed to the gills with fake sales and all manner of financial jiggery-pokery.  This signalled a 12- year transatlantic legal fight that led to Lynch’s extradition. When the US Department of Justice flexes its muscles, the world has to give in. His chances of winning were infinitesimal, less than 0.5 per cent of federal criminal cases in America end in acquittal.  Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy’s former finance director, had already been convicted for his part in the same alleged crime. Hussain, who was born in Bangladesh and came to Britain when he was seven, was sentenced to five years in prison by Charles Breyer, the eccentric, bow tie-wearing San Francisco Judge and started his sentence at the Allenwood penitentiary in Pennsylvania, returned home in January, before Lunch’s trial started in March 2024.  In 2022, a British High Court judge ruled in a civil case brought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise one of the two companies HP split into in 2015, that Lynch had in fact defrauded the company, Mr Justice Hildyard is expected to rule on damages before the end of the year.  Lynch faced up to 25 years in a US prison, if found guilty. Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares and some of his young legal team cried when the verdict was returned on June 6.  Following the ordeal, he want the extradition treaty between the UK and the US Overhauled.  Lynch had always maintained his innocence, arguing that he was being railroaded by a powerful American corporation stricken with a severe case of buyer’s remorse. It took more than $30 million in legal fees to get someone finally to agree with him, and just like that Lynch was free.  The tycoon now is keen to fund a British equivalent of the Innocence Project, the American non-profit organisation dedicated to freeing people who have been wrongly accused and convicted. “It has to be wrong that a US prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England than the UK police do. The system can sweep individuals away. There needs to be a contrarian possibility that’s saying “Right the whole world thinks you’re guilty but actually, was that affair conviction.” he said. He was bundled on to the back row of a United Airlines flight in restraints at Heathrow by US Marshalls.

Lynch founded Autonomy in 1996 and helped turn it into one of Britain’s rare home grown, tech success stories. Its sale to HP was supposed to be the crowning achievement of a career  that had secured him an OBE, in 2006. However, the US company would go on to claim that he had cooked the books, and had tricked it into paying $5 billion over the odds.

Lynch, a dog lover living in a ivy-covered terraced house in Chelsea, west London, has six dogs: two dachshunds and four sheep dogs including Facucet.