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HP awarded over £700m in autonomy fraud case

Hewlett Packard is owed more than £700 million ($944 million) from the estate of the late Mike Lynch and his former business partner, a United Kingdom’s court ruled on Tuesday.

This follows HP’s controversial acquisition of British software company Autonomy.

The United States tech giant had sued Lynch—who died last year when his yacht sank off the coast of Sicily—and Autonomy’s former CFO, Sushovan Hussain, accusing them of orchestrating a complex fraud that artificially inflated Autonomy’s value before its $11.1 billion sale in 2011.

HP later wrote down the value of the acquisition by $8.8 billion and filed a £5 billion lawsuit in London.

In 2022, the High Court ruled in HP’s favour.

Judge Robert Hildyard has now assessed HP’s losses at over £646 million ($871.8 million), citing the gap between what HP paid and what it would have paid had Autonomy’s true financial state been disclosed.

Lynch, once dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates,” denied any wrongdoing and blamed HP’s mismanagement of the integration.

He was acquitted of related criminal charges in the U.S. and had planned to appeal the UK ruling before his death.

Hildyard also ruled that HP is entitled to an additional £51.7 million for personal claims of deceit and misrepresentation against Dr. Lynch and Mr. Hussain, along with a further $47.5 million to cover losses incurred by HP group companies.