The estate of Mike Lynch has been granted permission to challenge a court order requiring it to pay Hewlett Packard (HP) £920 million over the sale of Autonomy, reviving a legal battle that has already run for more than a decade and threatens to wipe out the late technology entrepreneur’s fortune.
Lady Justice Asplin last week granted permission to appeal on four of the 14 grounds put forward by lawyers for the estate, ruling that the other ten had “no real prospect of success”.
The appeal will examine whether Lynch was aware of improper accounting at Autonomy, how the damages judgment against his estate was calculated, and the foreign exchange rates used when quantifying the award. The narrow grounds suggest the appeal is unlikely to exonerate Lynch, but it could reduce the amount his estate has to pay. It also means the ten year dispute between HP and Lynch, who died when his Bayesian superyacht sank two years ago, is likely to continue into next year.
A decade of litigation
HP sued Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, his former chief financial officer, in 2015 over the sale of Autonomy. The US technology group claimed that fraudulent accounting by Lynch and other executives had inflated the value of the FTSE 100 software company before HP bought it for $11 billion (£8 billion) in 2011.
The pair were found liable in the High Court in 2022, and in March this year Lynch’s estate was ordered to pay HP £920 million. That sum would bankrupt the estate, which has been estimated to be worth around £500 million. HP had earlier pared its damages claim back to $1.8 billion, a fraction of its original demands.
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