Estate of Mike Lynch ordered to pay £920m to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | Technology sector
The estate of late British tech tycoon Mike Lynch has been ordered to pay £920 million to tech company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), two years after he died in a superyacht disaster.
London’s high court said the estate was liable to pay the sum in damages, costs and interest from the acquisition of Lynch’s Autonomy firm by Hewlett-Packard (HP), following a legal ruling in the UK in 2022 that Lynch deceived the US company into paying £8.2bn to the software firm.
HP was split into two separate companies in 2015; one is still called HP and focuses on printers and personal computers, and the software and hardware company is HPE.
The value of the deceased entrepreneur’s estate is estimated to be around £500 million, so damages could send him into bankruptcy.
Lynch and six others, including her 18-year-old daughter Hannah, died during a trip with friends and family in August 2024 to celebrate her acquittal on US fraud charges relating to HP’s $11bn (£8.2bn) takeover of Autonomy in 2011.
HP accused Lynch and Autonomy’s former chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, of inflating the firm’s value before the acquisition. Within a year of the acquisition, HP reduced the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion.
The US tech company has sought damages of up to $4.55 billion in civil suits in the UK from the estate of the late businessman once hailed as Britain’s answer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
But last year the high court ruled that the level of the claim was “invariably exaggerated”, concluding that Lynch’s estate owed £700 million in damages. The £920 million figure includes costs and interest.
Lawyers for Lynch’s estate sought permission to appeal Tuesday’s ruling but were denied permission. However, the estate can appeal directly to the court of appeal.
HPE welcomed the decision, which it said in a statement “brings us one step closer to resolving the dispute.”
A spokesman for the Lynch family said: “We are disappointed in the court’s dismissal and believe that appeals should be made in the interests of justice. It has already been revealed that HP’s $5 billion claim for damages was grossly exaggerated.”
“In today’s decision, exaggeration is described as ‘unfounded’, and ‘the purposes for which it was set up, announced to the public and followed’ are described as harmful, misleading the stakeholders and unnecessarily prolonging the case.
“Dr Lynch’s acquittal in the US, where witnesses were properly cross-examined, revealed the truth. The damage to Autonomy was the result of HP’s own actions and failures, not any wrongdoing at Autonomy.”
