20
● Despite the Continent’s skepticism of U.S. tech giants, much of its
sensitive financial data is under their stewardship
Europeans grumble that they haven’t had a truly
global tech giant since Nokia Oyj’s heyday. But for
Europe’s banks, the most pressing digital need isn’t
for a homegrown phone that can compete with
Apple Inc.’s or Google’s. The banks are looking for
cloud computing providers with higher security
standards than they can find in the U.S. Their search
is far from over.
In a recent Bloomberg survey of Europe’s top
banks, 22 of 22 respondents said their primary
cloud services are American. The three leading U.S.
cloud providers—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—
are at the top, though unlike in the broader market,
Microsoft Corp. beats out Amazon.com Inc. for No. 1.
Rounding out the list are IBM, Salesforce.com, and
NetApp. While some lenders say they also work with
European cloud companies, it’s usually in a second-
ary role. The U.S. companies’ servers support the
sophisticated numbers crunching for tasks like risk
management and increasingly house such sensitive
data as borrowers’ personal information.
The banks aren’t happy about this. The virtue
of off-site cloud servers is that their scale generally
allows companies to store and compute data for less
than they’d spend on their own—and the prices perwith Rabinowitz, 93 days and 58 witnesses after
the trial started, suggested this question might’ve
proved a sticking point. “One often wonders when
fraud is suggested, what can have been its purpose?”
he asked. Autonomy was being readied for sale,
Rabinowitz said. “OK, I shall look at that,” Hildyard
responded before adjourning.
The decision is crucial for Lynch, because his
prospects in the U.S. don’t seem great. He could face
a prison term as long as 20 years if he’s extradited
to the U.S. and found guilty in a criminal case there.
In 2018 a San Francisco court convicted Hussain of
fraud, and he was subsequently sentenced to five
years in prison. Hussain has appealed. His lawyer
in the U.S. case had argued that HPE deployed an
army of company lawyers and consultants to sup-
port the government prosecution, which he said
relied on false testimony from cooperating wit-
nesses. Hussain’s lawyer for the U.K. civil trial leaned
on Lynch to make the executives’ case in Britain,
with Hussain opting to stay in the U.S. to focus on
appealing the criminal ruling there. A representative
for Hussain didn’t immediately return a Bloomberg
request for comment.
An HPE victory would offer some vindication
for shareholders with long memories. Autonomy,
whose assets the company mostly sold off a couple
of years back, was its biggest disaster, capping a run
of lousy acquisitions before HP split. (Remember the
Palm tablet? Neither does anyone else.)
HPE has cautioned against putting too much
weight behind the U.K. civil court judgment. There’s
no reason it would be “relevant or even admissi-
ble” in a San Francisco criminal court, the com-
pany said in its closing argument. Political allies of
Lynch, on the other hand, argue that if he’s cleared
in the civil case, he shouldn’t be extradited. David
Davis, a member of Parliament, said in a January
speech in the House of Commons that if HPE fails to
win its civil case against Lynch, the case for extra-
dition “would evaporate.” Lynch has become part
of Davis’s broader crusade against what he calls a
one-sided U.S. extradition policy. Most recently, the
U.S. Department of State refused to extradite an
American intelligence official’s wife to the U.K. on
charges that she killed a teenager while driving on
the wrong side of the road outside a military base
in England.
Lynch’s lawyers have another strategy to keep
him out of the San Francisco courtroom: arguing
that a person shouldn’t be extradited if the alleged
offenses could have been tried in the U.K. This has
worked twice recently, with a British trader and a
computer activist.
If Lynch can keep himself on British soil, he’ll beTHE BOTTOM LINE A coming verdict in a U.K. civil trial has Lynch
facing either redemption or defeat. If he’s cleared, he could avoid
extradition and a U.S. criminal trial.▼ Share of global
trading revenue
◼Top four European
banks
◼Top four U.S. banks
100%500
2010 2019Europe’s Banks
Rest on American
Clouds
able to refocus on wooing investors for his venture
firm, Invoke Capital. Invoke is important to Lynch’s
standing, and that of the U.K. tech community, in
more ways than one. Darktrace Ltd., a prominent
U.K. cybersecurity startup that Invoke has backed, is
considering going public. Something that could help
Lynch’s ventures: The $160 million he’s sought, in a
countersuit, from HPE to account for alleged dam-
ages to his reputation. �Jonathan Browning◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek March 9, 2020