Bloomberg Businessweek USA - 09.03.2020

(Barré) #1

18


Edited by
Jeff Muskus and
Rebecca Penty

Bloomberg Businessweek March 9, 2020

and, in 2011, wrote a $10.3 billion check to buy it.
That was validation not only for Britain’s “Silicon
Fen” but also for Mike Lynch, the University of
Cambridge graduate with a Ph.D. in mathematical
computing who founded Autonomy in 1996. After
building it into the country’s second-biggest soft-
ware company, he personally made $815 million
from Autonomy’s sale. The adulation quickly turned
to scandal, however, for both HP and Lynch.
In 2012, HP wrote down the vast majority of the
deal and alleged that Lynch had orchestrated a mas-
sive accounting fraud to dress Autonomy up for a
sale. The company says it wants $5 billion in dam-
ages from Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy’s
finance director. But the nine-month, £40  mil-
lion ($51 million) U.K. civil trial—among the longest
and most expensive in modern British history—has
painted an unflattering picture of the American cor-
poration, full of infighting and internal skulduggery,
documented in dueling emails and testimony from
top HP executives. When HP split in two in 2015,
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), the half that
kept the AI division under former Chief Executive
Officer and EBay Inc. legend Meg Whitman, contin-
ued the legal fight against Lynch.

Back when everyone still said “big data” instead
of “machine learning,” the U.K.’s Autonomy
Corp. considered itself an early leader in sorting
and analyzing huge troves of information about
online behavior, from video views to Facebook
likes. Hewlett-Packard  Co. thought so too

● HP and successor HPE
have spent almost a decade
trying to recoup $5 billion from
entrepreneur Mike Lynch over a
bad takeover

When a Tech


Giant Goes


To Court


T E C H N O L O G Y
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