Mike Lynch, a British software mogul who was once celebrated as a top technology leader — only to spend more than a decade defending himself against accusations that he orchestrated one of the biggest frauds in Silicon Valley history — died on Monday after his yacht sank off the coast of Sicily. He was 59.
An official in the Italian city of Palermo confirmed on Thursday that Mr. Lynch’s body had been recovered by divers.
Twelve guests and 10 crew members were onboard the yacht, the Bayesian, when it went down during a violent storm. Mr. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was rescued, along with nine crew members and six passengers. Six bodies have been recovered and one person is still missing, Mr. Lynch’s daughter Hannah Lynch.
Mr. Lynch’s death came two months after he was acquitted in San Francisco federal court of criminal fraud charges, tied to the $11 billion sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. The takeover, widely regarded among investors as one of the worst deals in history, led HP to accuse Mr. Lynch of deception.
U.S. prosecutors charged Mr. Lynch with more than a dozen counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the deal, with a potential sentence running to about two decades in prison.
On the day in 2023 that a British judge found him liable for civil fraud in the matter, the British government — despite numerous appeals by Mr. Lynch — approved his extradition to the United States. He was confined to a townhouse under 24-hour surveillance, on his own dime. During his house arrest, his mother, Dolores, and his brother, Richard, died.
The accusations sullied the reputation of Mr. Lynch, who was known at one point as Britain’s Bill Gates.
Michael Richard Lynch was born on June 16, 1965, to Michael and Dolores Lynch, working-class immigrants from Ireland, and grew up outside London. He attended private school on a scholarship and graduated from Cambridge before founding Autonomy in 1996. The company helped clients analyze unstructured information to unearth hidden insights about their businesses.
By 2011, Autonomy had become one of Britain’s most prominent technology companies, with its home base sometimes called “Silicon Fen,” a name derived from its location at the southern tip of the Fenland, a marshy area in eastern England.
Mr. Lynch became a celebrity in British tech circles. He was a member of the Royal Society, one of the country’s top scientific associations; an adviser to David Cameron, the prime minister at the time; and a member of the BBC’s board.
Autonomy drew the attention of HP, which had sought to transform its fortunes by buying a high-powered software company, and eventually paid 60 percent over the British company’s market value. But investors and analysts opposed the deal, and HP wrote down the value of the transaction by $8.8 billion. HP fired the chief executive who led the deal and, soon after, Mr. Lynch himself.
Meg Whitman, the former eBay leader who took over HP, accused Mr. Lynch and his lieutenants of “serious accounting improprieties” that misled her company over the state of Autonomy’s business.
But Mr. Lynch — armed with the hundreds of millions that he collected from Autonomy’s sale — hired an army of lawyers to argue that HP had been aware of the company’s practices. His team also said that Mr. Lynch had largely delegated the company’s day-to-day financial operations.
Mr. Lynch’s trial began in San Francisco in March, stretching out over three months and involving reams of often dense internal documents. After two days of deliberations, a jury found him and Stephen Chamberlain, a former Autonomy vice president of finance who faced similar charges, not guilty on all counts. (Mr. Chamberlain was fatally struck by a car on Saturday while out for a run, his lawyer, Gary S. Lincenberg, said Monday in an emailed statement.)
After the verdict, Mr. Lynch said in a statement, “I am looking forward to returning to the U.K. and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.” He later returned to his homes, in London and Suffolk.
While defending himself against the HP accusations, Mr. Lynch became a venture capitalist, founding Invoke Capital to invest in companies including the cybersecurity provider Darktrace.
More recently, he had begun to focus on artificial intelligence research, including ways the technology could help those with hearing difficulties.
Survivors include his wife and another daughter, Esme.
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