The estate of Mike Lynch, the British technology executive who died when his yacht sank off the Italian coast last summer, and his former business partner owe Hewlett Packard Enterprise more than 700 million pounds ($945 million) over the 2011 sale of his company to Hewlett-Packard, a London judge has ruled.
The decision, which had been delayed several months after the death of Lynch, was a long-awaited development in the legal fight over Autonomy, the software company he sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. Hewlett-Packard later accused Lynch and others of fraudulently inflating the company’s value.
The amount was far less than the $4 billion sought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a successor company to Hewlett-Packard. “I consider that HP’s claim was always substantially exaggerated,” the presiding judge, Robert Hildyard, wrote in the decision.
But the judgment is more than the current value of the Lynch estate, which The Times of London recently appraised to be about 473 million pounds. The estate is on the hook for a majority of the damages owed to Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The judgment was the latest twist in Lynch’s story. He had been heralded as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates after the Autonomy sale, but soon after that deal Hewlett-Packard accused top Autonomy executives, including Lynch, of lying about the state of the business and wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion.
In 2015, Hewlett-Packard accused the British executive and the company’s former chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, of fraud and sued them in a London court. Both men denied the allegations.
Lynch and Hussain were found liable in 2022 after a trial that Hildyard called “amongst the longest and most complex in English legal history.”
Hussain was also convicted in 2018 of a criminal fraud charge that was tied to the Autonomy takeover, but Lynch was found not guilty last year.
Lynch then invited friends and associates on a boating trip to celebrate his acquittal. Lynch and six others — including his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah; one of his longtime lawyers, Christopher J. Morvillo; and the ship’s cook, Recaldo Thomas — died Aug. 19 when his family’s yacht capsized in bad weather off the coast of Sicily.
Fifteen passengers and crew survived, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares.
In a statement Tuesday, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said, “We are pleased that this decision brings us a step closer to the resolution of this dispute.”
A spokesperson for the Lynch estate released a statement that Lynch had written before his death, with numbers updated to reflect the July 22 judgment: “Today’s High Court ruling reflects that HP’s original $5 billion damages claim was not just a wild overstatement — misleading shareholders — but it was off the mark by 80%.”
Jeremy Sandelson, the court-appointed administrator of the Lynch estate, said in a statement that he would weigh further steps, including whether to appeal both the damages and the original finding that the Autonomy founder was liable.
Before his death, Lynch had been expected to appeal both.
c.2025 The New York Times Company. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
