London's High Court has ordered the estate of Mike Lynch to pay Hewlett-Packard £920m, settling the financial consequences of one of the most acrimonious technology deals of the past two decades.
The sum covers compensation, costs and interest arising from HP's £8.2bn acquisition of Autonomy, Lynch's Cambridge-based software group, in 2011. A separate UK court ruling in 2022 found that Lynch had fraudulently misrepresented Autonomy's finances to induce the deal.
Lynch died in August 2024 when his superyacht Bayesian sank off Sicily, leaving his estate to face the remaining civil liability. The £920m award represents a fraction of the roughly £5bn HP originally wrote down on the Autonomy acquisition, a figure that triggered years of litigation on both sides of the Atlantic.
HP had pursued Lynch and his former finance director Sushil Vajpayee through the English courts for over a decade. Lynch had always maintained his innocence and was acquitted in a parallel US criminal fraud trial in June 2024, just weeks before his death. The civil standard of proof is lower than the criminal threshold, which allowed the English court to reach a different conclusion on the underlying conduct.
The scale of any recovery from the estate will depend on its composition and any competing claims, details that remain unclear from the rulings published so far.
