Mike Lynch, once hailed as Britain’s king of technology, has been cleared of charges alleging he orchestrated a fraud and conspiracy leading up to an 11-billion-dollar (£8.64 billion) deal that turned into a costly albatross for Silicon Valley pioneer Hewlett Packard (HP).
The not-guilty verdicts reached on Thursday by a federal court jury in San Francisco followed an 11-week criminal trial that delved into the history of HP’s 2011 acquisition of Autonomy, a business software that Mr Lynch founded and then oversaw as chief executive in Britain.
HP at first celebrated the purchase as a huge coup that would propel the Palo Alto, California, company down a promising new path, but then quickly came to regret under its then-chief executive Meg Whitman.
The jury acquitted Mr Lynch on all 15 felony counts facing him.
Towards the end of the trial, US District Judge Charles Breyer threw out a count of securities fraud included in the US Justice Department case against him in an indictment dating back to 2018.
It took years to extradite Mr Lynch from the UK and then more legal wrangling before the trial finally began in mid-March.
