Is Britain’s Bill Gates about to spend 25 years in a U.S. prison cell? Mike Lynch faces fraud charges in a California court – defended by a lawyer who represented Jeffrey Epstein and Roman Polanski

Mike Lynch’s first computer breakthrough was a program that allowed law enforcement officers to instantly match suspects’ fingerprints to data in their database.

In the early 1990s it would have been hard to believe that the tech genius, hailed as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates, who would later become an adviser to David Cameron’s government and also sit on the board of the BBC, would one day own fingerprints taken.

But in a monumental fall from grace that has seen the 58-year-old tycoon spend much of the past year under house arrest with an electronic tag on his ankle, Lynch will enter a San Francisco courtroom today to defend himself against fraud. and conspiracy charges that could see him imprisoned for decades.

His corner will be fought by a legal team led by Reid Weingarten, one of the American legal system’s most successful white-collar defenders, whose client list includes such infamous characters as the film director Roman Polanski, who fled the US in the late 1970s after committing statutory rape of a minor, and the late serial pedophile and friend of Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein.

Weingarten, a former master at representing the rich and famous, has said he sometimes feels like he is part of the French Revolution, “defending the nobility against the howling crowd.”

A string of heavily hyped Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — from Elizabeth Holmes of blood-testing company Theranos to cryptocurrency guru Sam Bankman-Fried — have been exposed as shameless fraudsters in recent years.

Infected by the tech industry’s mantra of ‘Fake it till you make it’, they have ended up in jail after being caught over-exaggerating their business achievements.

Mike Lynch OBE was similarly praised for having the Midas touch, and the blustering Essex lad, a 007 obsessive who himself looks rather like a Bond villain, became a leading light in a British tech industry that had little real has produced global figures.

He now faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted of 17 counts of conspiracy, securities and bank fraud.

The charges relate to the business deal that was hailed at the time as his crowning achievement: the £8.6 billion sale of his software and data business Autonomy to US computer giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.

Lynch, who personally made more than £500 million from the deal, became one of Britain’s richest people and everyone wanted to hear his advice on how to get ahead in business.

But the shine quickly faded when HP wrote down three-quarters of Autonomy’s value just a year after the purchase, fired Lynch and accused him and other executives of vastly inflating its size and profits during the sale.

Lynch, along with former Autonomous Treasury Vice President Stephen Chamberlain, deny the charges but will face an uphill task in proving their innocence to formidable US federal prosecutors, who rarely lose such cases.

It doesn’t help that Lynch has already lost a 2019 civil fraud case based on similar allegations that HP – now Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) – brought to the UK. The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that HPE had “substantially won” its case.

His separate three-year battle to avoid extradition and criminal charges culminated in Lynch going to the Supreme Court to argue that US prosecutors had committed legal overreach that endangered British sovereignty and its citizens brought.

His plea was rejected and last May he was flown to California accompanied by the US Marshals Service, still loudly protesting his innocence.

The trial, which begins today, will be held before a jury in a city just 30 miles from HPE’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

At least the trial will get him out of the house. After prosecutors convinced a judge that Lynch posed a serious flight risk, he was forced to post $100 million bail, surrender his passport and agree to house arrest.

As a result, Lynch has spent the past eleven months largely confined to a £27,000-a-month rental house in the posh Pacific Heights area, with video cameras scanning every room 24 hours a day, and that GPS tracking bracelet around his ankle. .

The judge overseeing his trial recently relaxed the conditions of his confinement slightly, allowing him to go out between 9am and 9pm, but only if accompanied by two armed private guards – a service he has had to pay for himself.

Described as a “model supervisee” by the security firm monitoring him, Lynch reportedly spends his days talking to his investment firm Invoke Capital, controlling the research he is funding in Cambridge into artificial intelligence. receives intelligence and updates on the health of his rare species. Red Poll cattle on his farm in Suffolk.

And most pressing of all, he has discussed with his lawyers how he will defend himself in a trial that could stretch into late May. In this case, they will have to do their job.

HPE revealed last month that it is seeking more than £3 billion in damages from Lynch, who is estimated to be worth £1 billion, although his lawyers put the figure at no more than £350 million.

However, clinging to his freedom rather than his wealth will be the priority in the coming weeks for a man whom prosecutors reportedly plan to portray – using testimony from ex-employees – as an overbearing and ruthless tycoon who behaved in business like a strong mafia boss.

And Lynch, a Cambridge-educated computer expert who liked to pepper his public pronouncements with criminal nonsense – “In tech, you should bring a gun to a knife fight,” was one of his optimistic statements – is certainly nothing if not unconventional.

He continued the jokey connection to crime in his corporate videos. In a five-minute video for Autonomy’s sales staff made in 2005, Lynch poses as a mob boss known as “Big Mike” and takes a conference call with his underbosses, all of whom wear mob-style fedoras.

As Big Mike sits at his desk sharpening his knife, one of his followers complains that he couldn’t fit a rival’s “wife in the trunk of the car” because “the broad’s legs were too long.”

Another jokes about having to tie someone up with string “but he kept breaking out,” while a third gets so angry about the workers not “picking up” that he smashes a phone with a baseball bat.

Some may dismiss the video as harmless fun, but US prosecutors claim it was actually very revealing. They plan to introduce the video at Lynch’s trial as evidence of his actual criminal management style.

They plan to call witnesses who will say that he has frequently compared Autonomy to the mafia and portrayed himself as someone “to whom the rules do not apply.” He is said to have said to an employee: ‘You can never leave, we are like the mafia, we are like family.’

Prosecutors accuse Lynch of not only “artificially inflating” Autonomy’s balance sheets and falsifying its accounts, but also of intimidating or firing analysts who challenged them.

According to prosecutors, Lynch once told his head of investor relations that he could have a research analyst “killed” for criticizing the company.

During pre-trial hearings, Lynch’s attorneys objected to the prosecution’s inclusion of the company video into evidence, saying it was “harmless banter.”

They accused the prosecutors, who also want to point out to jurors their client’s fondness for Bond villains, of committing desperate character assassination. “HP was not defrauded and got exactly what it bargained for,” his lawyers say.

They argue that HP’s case is simply “a case study in buyer’s remorse,” and that the US company – which paid 66 percent more for Autonomy than its market value – knew exactly what it was getting.

In a desperate bid to expand its business beyond building computers and printers, Hewlett-Packard ruined the software company through its own mismanagement of it, Lynch’s team claims.

Raised in Chelmsford, Essex, by working-class Irish parents – his father was a firefighter, his mother a nurse – Lynch won a scholarship to a private school in east London, and later a place at Cambridge University, where he studied mathematics, physics and studied physics. biochemistry.

He subsequently obtained his PhD in mathematical computing. He started his first business in the late 1980s with just £2,000.

By 1991 he had founded Cambridge Neurodynamics, specializing in computer-based fingerprint recognition, and just five years later he co-founded Autonomy Corporation.

The latter quickly became a pioneer of Silicon Fen, the nickname for the cluster of technology companies around Cambridge that was Britain’s answer to Silicon Valley.

In 2010 the company was so successful that Lynch signed a £20 million shirt sponsorship deal with Tottenham Hotspur.

As his star rose, Lynch was embraced by the British establishment.

In 2006 he was awarded an OBE for services to enterprise, and the following year he was appointed to the BBC’s board of directors. He also became a trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a Fellow of the Royal Society and Deputy Lieutenant of Suffolk. In 2011, he was appointed to the Science and Technology Council by then Prime Minister David Cameron.

Unfortunately for Mike Lynch, such streamers may be of little value as American judges must decide whether he defrauded one of their country’s most celebrated tech companies.