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Mike Lynch loses US extradition delay bid: Flight across the Atlantic looks closer than ever

(2022/01/26)


Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch has lost a bid to delay his extradition to the US after a High Court judge ruled there was no reason to impose a months-long delay on the case.

Mr Justice Swift dismissed Lynch's [1]application for judicial review this morning, saying the entrepreneur failed to successfully argue that Home Secretary Priti Patel should have until March to decide whether or not Lynch ought to be extradited.

"In November [District Judge Snow] was being asked, for a second time, to allow a significant extension to the required period," said Mr Justice Swift in a written judgment handed down today. "It was hardly surprising that on that occasion he wanted to understand why the Secretary of State thought she needed to consider the contents of the judgment in the Chancery proceedings in order to decide whether specialty was a barrier to extradition."

[2]

Lynch had hoped that judgment in the £5bn UK civil fraud trial would clear him of alleged wrongdoing over the $11bn sale of software company Autonomy to Hewlett Packard in 2011.

[3]

[4]

In the US, Lynch is facing a criminal trial, charged with 17 counts of fraud, after HPE accused him of cooking the books to inflate Autonomy's sale price in 2011. Lynch denies the allegations.

[5]Autonomy founder's anti-extradition case is like saying Moon made of cheese, US govt tells UK court

[6]Autonomy accounts whistleblowers may testify at founder Mike Lynch's US criminal trial

[7]Brit analysts formed pact to crash Autonomy's market valuation, ex-CFO tells US court

[8]Hard drives at Autonomy offices were destroyed the same month CEO Lynch quit, extradition trial was told

[9]Deloitte settled HPE's Autonomy lawsuit for $45m back in 2016 and agreed to cooperate with US DoJ

The Autonomy founder had argued that American prosecutors seeking his extradition would use the High Court's judgment from the Autonomy trial to pile fresh criminal charges onto him. Specialty is the legal principle which says countries trying to extradite Britons must state all the potential criminal charges up front. The idea is to guard against politically motivated extraditions as opposed to genuine crimes.

The effect of today's decision is to force Patel to make a formal order for Lynch's extradition, meaning she and her officials won't get bags of time to read and digest the Autonomy UK cival trial's 1,500-page judgment. That judgment still hasn't been handed down, two years after the last hearing in the case.

Lynch's PR representatives declined to comment. He has 14 days to file a formal appeal against the inevitable extradition order, which means the case will proceed to the Court of Appeal.

[10]

As for the main High Court case before Chancery Division judge Mr Justice Hildyard, it seems closer than ever to being an irrelevance to Lynch's immediate future.

Lynch and former Autonomy vice president Steve Chamberlain face a multitude of wire fraud charges in the US. Chamberlain is already in the US but prosecutors are holding off starting the trial until Lynch is safely in their grasp.

HPE told The Register : "The Department of Justice's request to extradite Dr Lynch arises out of his indictment on criminal charges in the United States. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is not a party to the US criminal proceedings or the extradition request in the UK. The civil lawsuit filed in the UK against Dr Lynch in 2015 is an independent dispute between the parties." ®

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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/17/autonomy_lynch_extradition/

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YfF@O3zS2bw-2U448P2lUgAAAE0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YfF@O3zS2bw-2U448P2lUgAAAE0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YfF@O3zS2bw-2U448P2lUgAAAE0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/18/lynch_judicial_review_written_submissions/

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/25/autonomy_whistleblowers/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/12/autonomy_cfo_us_court/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/29/autonomy_founder_lynch_extradition_ruling/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/deloitte_settled_hpe_lynch_lawsuit_45m/

[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YfF@O3zS2bw-2U448P2lUgAAAE0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/



msobkow

To quote Nelson on The Simpsons: "Ha-Ha!!!"

Chris G

While I wouldn't buy a used car from Lynch without a thourough engineer's report, I would not wish the US vengeance/justice system on him or anybody else.

From what I see, murder has better outcomes for many who are found gulity compared to wire fraud.

msobkow

That depends entirely on your heritage and ethnicity, unfortunately...

Let the chuckles ring out!

Anonymous Coward

He'll be hearing my laughter from across the Atlantic once he arrives there. Used to work for this cretin - utterly miserable company, you could see they had serious culture and management problems long before the HP deal. I was there in 2005!

Re: Let the chuckles ring out!

Charlie Clark

What kind of a person Lynch isn't under discussion, I'm sure the same could be said for a heap of "captains of industry", especially in IT. What is under discussion if whether he and others committed fraud despite the apparent due diligence by HP and its auditors and whether they should be extradited to the US to stand trial despite an ongoing civil case in the US.

If you look at the history of mergers and acquisitions you will see that the majority of the big ones are written down at some point afterwards, because apparently not all the facts were disclosed. In reality, this is just usually some shareholders profiting at the expense of others. I mean, is this deal substantially different to Microsoft's purchase of Nokia Phones sans IP?

Re: Let the chuckles ring out!

Jellied Eel

It's all very strange.

Due diligence should have detected fraud, especially given the notional value of the deal. But such is politics. It seems odd though that there are multiple bites of the cherry. So as I understand it, civil trials have a lower burden of proof. So if Lynch is cleared in the civil case, and the charges & evidence is much the same in the criminal, why might that succeed, where the civil case may have failed?

OK, so the US is different to the UK, but it would seem fair to delay extradition until the verdict is in on the civil. Seems to me that would have big implications for both prosecution and defence. So judge rules not guilty & reminds HP about caveat emptor. The US might then decide to trim charges, or not prosecute. Or maybe it's guilty, and time to work on a plea.

I guess it's not that uncommon to end up with civil & criminal trying the same thing, but the process doesn't seem entirely fair.

Re: Let the chuckles ring out!

Malcolm Weir

I think this has the ethics backwards: criminal trials (in both the UK and the US) are supposed to be about weighing offenses against society as a whole (i.e. "crimes"). A civil trial is about weight a dispute between two (or more) individuals.

So obviously, IMHO, a criminal trial is a higher priority than a civil one.

And while Lynch and HPE are squabbling over, effectively, money, the whole point of a criminal trial for fraud is that you can be guilty of wire fraud even if the sums are negligible (not that anyone would prosecute a wire fraud for $1, but the principle remains).

So to me this is fundamentally Lynch trying to say something like he shouldn't be extradited because he's locked into a dispute with the milkman over unpaid bills for a couple of pints of gold top! And actually it's worse: the HPE/Lynch suit is practically done, except the judgment hasn't been handed down. There's no reason why Lynch shouldn't wait for the results in the USA instead of the UK!

(As to the issues of the US Justice system, etc... those are real, but effectively unchangeable on a case-by-case basis).

Re: Let the chuckles ring out!

oiseau

... whether he and others committed fraud despite the apparent due diligence by HP and its auditors ...

Of course ...

Sleazy Mike managed to pull a fast one, not only on HP but also on their lawyers, banks, auditors, etc.

... judgment still hasn't been handed down, two years after the last hearing in the case.

That this is still so is nothing short of a very embarrasing judicial scandal.

And a very large, greasy stain on both Mr Justice Hildyard's robe and powdery wig.

O.

1,500 pages? Damn that's huge.

ShadowSystems

There are entire novel series' that barely hit that kind of page count after several books in a row, so having it all in a single document just makes one wonder how the hell *anyone* is supposed to read it all in anything under several months.

I know he wants to delay the extradition, but "until the heat death of the universe" seems a rather lofty goal.

Given the time required to give it a proper read, absorb all the details, go back over it with a legal-fine-tooth-comb to untangle it, consider & research & review all the case law that might apply, and collate all the notes together to allow the creation of a proper reply, I envision such a task taking *YEARS* to do a proper job thereof.

I can't see any judge accepting such a delay on anything but the most dire of legal issues set before them, and a simple case such as this doesn't even come close. =-/

Re: 1,500 pages? Damn that's huge.

alain williams

But why a 2 year delay ?

Who is being pressured ?

Re: 1,500 pages? Damn that's huge.

colinb

What are you taking about? You don't need humans for that

"The Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) platform allows you to automate the way you analyze and understand unstructured data, which makes up over 90% of enterprise data. Autonomy’s IDOL Knowledge Management solution provides industry-leading search and analysis of data, with integrated retrieval and interaction capabilities."

Yours for 50p.

If that wasn't bad enough...

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Mike Lynch's Darktrace holdings fell (even further) on this news.

Still, I'm struggling to understand how he can be extradited while the UK fraud case is unresolved.

Re: If that wasn't bad enough...

alain williams

Still, I'm struggling to understand how he can be extradited while the UK fraud case is unresolved.

Because the USA government wants to give a USA company its money back. Money that it lost as it did not do due diligence before it bought Autonomy. Once he is in the USA he will be found guilty no matter what is the outcome of the UK fraud case. He will prolly be offered a plea bargain: admit guilt or risk 200 years in prison.

Re: If that wasn't bad enough...

Malcolm Weir

There is no UK fraud case. There is a civil dispute between HPE and Lynch, but the Crown is uninvolved.

In the USA, there is an indictment of "the people vs Lynch", which doesn't actually involve HPE except as a witness...

Justice blindfolded

Will Godfrey

If he goes, he will be found guilty no matter what evidence is presented (or its mysterious absence). This is purely about American protectionism and not losing face.

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs,
then the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.