LONDON, Jan 29 — US tech giant Hewlett Packard (HP) yesterday won its multibillion-dollar fraud case over its 2011 purchase of British software company Autonomy.
HP accused Autonomy of rigging its accounts, deliberately inflating its value and causing huge losses for the US company when the true situation emerged after the US$11.1-billion (RM46.5 billion) sale.
It sued Mike Lynch, Autonomy’s British founder, and former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain, for around five billion dollars.
High court judge Robert Hildyard delivered a summary of his conclusions on Friday, saying HP and the other claimants had “substantially won” their claim.
His full judgment, in what is believed to be Britain’s biggest-ever civil fraud trial, is due to be published later.
Hildyard said the amount of damages to be paid will also be dealt with at a later date.
HP claimed the two men “artificially inflated Autonomy’s reported revenues, revenue growth and gross margins... over a sustained period of time.”
The company announced an US$8.8-billion write-down of the firm’s value just over a year after the sale.
Interior minister Priti Patel yesterday signed an order for the extradition of Lynch to the US, where he faces separate criminal proceedings over the sale, the Home Office said in a statement.
Lynch has the right to apply to the High Court for leave to appeal against this decision, it added.
Lynch’s lawyer Chris Morvillo said his client “firmly denies the charges brought against him in the US and will continue to fight to establish his innocence”.
Lynch was “a British citizen who ran a British company in Britain, subject to British laws and rules and that is where the matter should be resolved,” Morvillo said, adding that Lynch would now appeal.
Lynch, from Suffolk in eastern England, claimed HP was making him “a scapegoat for their failures”.
HP’s lawyer Laurence Rabinowitz told the court that Autonomy used “a variety” of fraudulent devices to boost or invent revenue.
A US court in 2018 convicted Autonomy’s finance chief Hussain of fraud relating to the sale and jailed him for five years. — AFP
