Michael Lynch, faces extradition to US over major fraud allegations

An Irish-born billionaire is facing extradition to the US after a UK court ruled that he can face multi-billion dollar fraud charges in America.

Michael Lynch, once dubbed Britain’s Bill Gates, is accused of allegedly cooking the books at his former firm Autonomy before it was sold to US firm Hewlett-Packard for $11billion in 2011.

The US Department of Justice has pursued Mr Lynch over allegations that he inflated sales at Autonomy. The Silicon Valley hardware giant HP acquired the software company in 2011 only to write down the value by $8.8billion a year later.

Mr Lynch, who personally made more than $800million from the HP deal, was ‘the leader of a corporate conspiracy,’ the US said. He was arrested in February last year and has been on bail ever since.

The 56-year-old, who was born in Tipperary before moving to England as a baby with his Irish parents, denies the allegations and has sought to block a request to extradite him to face trial in the US.

But district judge Michael Snow, who heard the case in London’s Westminster magistrates’ court, sided against him. The judge’s decision did not weigh Mr Lynch’s alleged guilt or innocence but on whether he could legally be sent across the Atlantic under the controversial UK-US extradition agreement.

It means the decision to extradite Mr Lynch now falls to Britain’s Home Secretary Priti Patel. If she agrees, he would have 14 days to appeal.

Mr Snow rejected requests to wait for the outcome of a separate British high court trial examining the fraud allegations, expected in September.

Mr Lynch’s lawyers said the allegations related to a British company on the London stock exchange and should be settled in the UK. Chris Morvillo, for Mr Lynch, said: ‘If the Home Secretary nonetheless decides to order extradition, Dr Lynch intends to appeal.’

Mr Lynch told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme that the decision was not unexpected, because of the terms of the extradition treaty the UK has with the US. He said: ‘We have this imbalance and this default extradition treaty which can be used [in] any dispute that’s going on with American companies and their interests.

‘The insanity of this extradition treaty [is that] it doesn’t rely on any facts.’

Mr Lynch claimed his former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain, who was jailed for five years in 2019, did not receive a fair trial. He said no defence witnesses turned up to Mr Hussain’s trial because they were told they would be arrested if they entered the US.

While in his youth, Mike Lynch’s parents – a fireman and a nurse – emigrated from Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary, to Essex in England. He won a scholarship to a private school in Surrey, where his interest in the sciences began.

In the late 1980s, he founded his first company, Lynett Systems Ltd and in 1996 he cofounded Autonomy Corporation and made major purchases of other tech companies. An exdirector of the BBC, he has an OBE and was on various boards, including of the British Library.

He also owns a James Bondstyle Aston Martin and raises cattle and sheep at his large estate in Surrey. Mr Lynch has said he wanted to use the money he made from the Autonomy deal ‘to make some kind of difference… through charities ‘.