A UK court has awarded over £700 million to American IT company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in a fraud case against late British businessman Mike Lynch, who died in a shipwreck off the coast of Sicily last Summer.
In early 2022, the High Court in London found that HPE, one of two companies that emerged from a 2015 split of Hewlett-Packard (HP), had been wronged in a civil case linked to the sale of software firm Autonomy but did not determine the damages.
The awarded amount is significantly lower than the $5 billion (€4.3 billion) initially sought by HPE. According to French news agency AFP, which accessed the court’s decision, the judge considered HPE’s claims to be greatly exaggerated.
Lynch and former Autonomy Chief Financial Officer Sushovan Hussain were accused of inflating the company’s value using accounting tricks before its sale to HPE, which paid over $11 billion in 2011. HPE later announced that it was writing down the value of Autonomy by $8.8bn because it had found "serious accounting improprieties."
Lynch, often dubbed the ‘British Bill Gates,’ died tragically along with other passengers when his luxury yacht, Bayesian, sank off Italy in August 2024.
That trip was intended to celebrate his acquittal in a separate criminal case in the United States related to the same allegations.
