By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 26, 2024 ~
Mike Lynch
On May 12, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had extradited from the United Kingdom, Michael Lynch, the former CEO of Autonomy Corporation, to stand trial in the Northern District Court of California, alongside the former Vice President of Finance at Autonomy, Stephen Chamberlain.
Among the numerous charges brought by the Justice Department were these:
“…between 2009 and 2011, Lynch and Chamberlain, and other co-conspirators, (1) artificially inflated Autonomy’s revenues by backdating written agreements to record revenue in prior periods; recorded revenue on contracts that were subject to side letters or other contingencies that impacted revenue recognition; and improperly recorded revenue for reciprocal or roundtrip transactions…”
As part of this alleged scheme to defraud, according to the Justice Department, “…Lynch and Chamberlain caused Autonomy to make materially false and misleading statements directly to HP [Hewlett-Packard] regarding Autonomy’s financial condition, performance, and business during the negotiations between HP and Autonomy leading up to the August 18, 2011, announcement by HP to acquire Autonomy for approximately $11 billion.”
It has been reported that Lynch made approximately $800 million on the sale of Autonomy to HP.
Both Lynch and Chamberlain were acquitted on all charges on June 7, following a jury trial that lasted three months.
Less than two months following the trial, on Saturday, August 17, Chamberlain was out running in Cambridgeshire, England and was hit by a car. Chamberlain died of his injuries after being hospitalized.
Two days later, on Monday, August 19, Mike Lynch, Chamberlain’s co-defendant in the Justice Department trial, died when his “unsinkable” 184-foot sailing yacht sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Sicily during a storm that failed to harm other nearby yachts.
Making these deaths all the more suspicious, two other individuals involved in the criminal trial died in the sinking of the yacht: the Chair of Morgan Stanley International, Jonathan Bloomer, who had been a witness for the defense; and the attorney for Mike Lynch during the trial, Chris Morvillo, of law firm Clifford Chance.
The statistical improbability of four people connected to one criminal case dying within 72 hours in two separate unusual events is raising eyebrows.
Equally suspect, there were 22 people on board the yacht with 15 people surviving, including 9 members of the 10-member crew, who made it to a life boat. Other survivors in the life boat included Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares; the Managing Partner of Lynch’s venture capital firm, Invoke Capital, Charlotte Golunshi and her one-year old daughter; and Clifford Chance lawyer Ayla Ronald and her partner, Matthew Fletcher.
The seven deceased victims from the sinking of the yacht were Lynch; his 18-year old daughter, Hannah; Bloomer and his wife, Judy; Morvillo and his wife, Neda; and the yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas.
To put that more starkly, the crew had a 90 percent survival rate while the other passengers had a 58 percent survival rate.
Reuters is reporting this morning that Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation and have conducted multiple interviews with the Captain of the yacht, James Cutfield. Maritime law places the safety of the ship, crew and all passengers as the responsibility of the Captain.
For unknown reasons, the Captain was able to make it to the lifeboat while six of the seven who died were trapped below deck in cabins or hallways, where their bodies were eventually located by divers. The chef was reportedly found floating in the water.
Lynch’s life had been a living hell for the five years before the tragedy on the yacht. Prior to his acquittal in June, he had been living under house arrest for a year in a townhouse in San Francisco, with guards watching his every move.
On April 30, 2018, the former CFO of Autonomy, Sushovan Hussain, was separately tried and convicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in the same U.S. District Court that heard the case against Lynch and Chamberlain. Hussain was convicted of one count of conspiracy, fourteen counts of wire fraud and one count of securities fraud involving Autonomy’s sale to Hewlett-Packard. Hussain served five years in prison.
Another company in which Lynch’s venture capital firm had invested money following the sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard was Darktrace, a cyber-security firm which was packed with people from the U.K.’s intelligence agency MI5 and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). In 2023, the short-seller, Quintessential Capital Management, published a lengthy report alleging claims against Darktrace that had a familiar ring to some of the charges brought by the Justice Department against Autonomy executives.
Quintessential Capital’s researchers wrote this about Darktrace:
“Our opinion is based primarily on numerous transactions we detected during the period leading to DT’s [Darktrace’s] IPO seemingly involving simulated or anticipated sales to phantom end-users through a network of willing resellers. Darktrace seems to have repeatedly used marketing activities to channel funds back into its partners as payment for apparently fictitious purchases. These alleged channel stuffing and round-tripping activities seem to have even involved shell companies in offshore jurisdictions….”
Hewlett-Packard is no boy scout either. The company was scandalized in 2006 when Newsweek broke the story that it had spied on its own Board of Directors and journalists, illegally obtaining their phone records in some cases to ascertain with whom they had been in contact.
