The story of Mike Lynch continues to get weirder and weirder.
Timeline below...
2011: Lynch sells his company Autonomy to HP. (Autonomy had acquired Iron Mountain months prior.) The market hates the deal, the board fires HP's CEO and appoints Meg Whitman as the new CEO of HP.
2012: HP claims that Autonomy had improper accounting and $5B of the deal value is linked to "serious accounting improprieties, misrepresentation, and disclosure failures"
By the end of the year, the DOJ, SEC and the UK's Serious Fraud Office are investigating the case.
2013: Despite the ongoing investigation, Lynch founds Darktrace, a new cyber security startup.
Over time, Darktrace sells its products to various intelligence agencies.
2021: Darktrace goes public.
2023: Darktrace is also accused of accounting errors by short sellers.
Fast forward to 2024... Mike Lynch is now in the US after getting extradited from the UK.
June: Lynch and co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain are found not guilty of fraud after 12 years of criminal investigation.
A civil case in the UK for $4B still remains open.
August 17th: Chamberlain is hit by a car while jogging.
August 19th: Lynch's yacht, the Bayesian, sinks off coast of Sicily due to a "mini tornado" killing Lynch and six other passengers. A dutch boat nearby survives the storm.
Chamberlain dies in the hospital the same day.
Today: reports surface that the Bayesian may have contained "watertight safes containing two super-encrypted hard drives that hold highly classified information" tied to intelligence services.
Italian prosecutors have heightened security around the wreckage as they investigate.
Sources / further reading:
cio.com/article/304397…
theregister.com/2015/10/02/mik…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darktrace
cnn.com/2024/09/03/bus…
theguardian.com/world/article/…
cnn.com/2024/09/21/eur…
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