Jury clears Autonomy CEO of fraud charges

A jury in San Francisco on Thursday unanimously cleared Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch of 15 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud stemming from his company’s purchase by Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $11.1 billion dollars. HP executives had maintained that Lynch fooled them when he sold Autonomy — HP subsequently had to write down the value of the acquisition by over $5 billion — whereas Lynch maintained that he had been truthful. Jurors on Thursday sided with him.

The charges against Lynch were brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. He was extradited from the UK to face the charges and released to home confinement in San Francisco after posting a $100 million bond.

This is not Lynch’s only face-off with the law over the sale of Autonomy: there’s also a long-running case in London where the judge is still considering the award of damages. See our timeline of the HP-Autonomy M&A disaster.

The superseding indictment in the case decided Thursday in San Francisco alleged that Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former vice president of finance, “engaged in a scheme to defraud purchasers and sellers of Autonomy securities, including HP, about the true performance of Autonomy’s business, its financial condition, and its prospects for growth,” the US Attorney’s Office said at the time of the indictment.

“I am elated with today’s verdict and grateful to the jury for their attention to the facts over the last 10 weeks,” Lynch said on Thursday, according to a report from The Guardian. “My deepest thanks go to my legal team for their tireless work on my behalf. I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.”

Testimony raised questions about where the blame fell, with some arguing that HP’s senior management team — led at the time by CEO Meg Whitman — were blaming Lynch for their mismanagement of the acquisition and the subsequent integration.

Whitman was never called to testify, a fact that some observers said likely played a role in the jury’s decision.

Joe Ahmad, a corporate attorney and co-founder of the Houston law firm of Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Mensing, was one of those who cited Megman’s lack of an appearance as problematic.

“In a battle between a rich founder executive and a sophisticated larger company, where the larger company bought the founder’s company, people will assume that the larger company is responsible for doing its due diligence. They will likely assume the company executives should know better than to rely purely on representations of the other side’s management. Some jurors tend to believe that these companies and executives operate in infested waters and should know it is ‘buyer beware,’” Ahmad said in an interview with CIO.com. “The theme that HP and Whitman — who’s also a politician, not always seen as a trustworthy occupation — would blame others for their own mismanagement or failures is easy for some jurors to believe.”

In that context, jurors may have expected Whitman to testify, and the fact that she didn’t “may have raised some suspicion and doubt in their minds,” Ahmad said. “And the fact that Lynch did testify and that he, over days, played guide and teacher to the jury about British phrases had to endear him to the jurors. Given all that, it wasn’t a surprising outcome.”