Mike Lynch
Born in Ireland, raised in Essex, educated at Cambridge and by some measures one of the most successful City of London entrepreneurs ever, Mike Lynch is now no stranger to controversy.
He was extradited to the US to face criminal charges after the £7.4-billion sale of Autonomy, the data-management company he founded, ended in the courts. The buyer, Hewlett-Packard, won a multi-billion dollar fraud case over the deal, having accused Lynch of “artificially inflated Autonomy’s reported revenues, revenue growth and gross margins”.
Lynch is now faced with the prospect of fighting the allegations – which he continues to deny – over the Atlantic. He argues he should face trial in the UK.
Whatever the circumstances of the sale, the former student of physics, maths and biophysics is one of the biggest names in UK business. Lynch started his first company in the 1980s. It made products used in the recording industry in the 1980s with a £2,000 loan from the manager of a band. Once called the UK’s answer to Bill Gates, his expertise in pattern recognition helped take Autonomy all the way to the FTSE 100, before one of the biggest deals of all time also turned into one of most notorious.
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