Mike Lynch is preparing to campaign against Britain’s extradition treaty with the US after the tech entrepreneur was acquitted of fraud following a six-year battle with America’s justice system.
The Autonomy founder has said he will work with former Cabinet minister David Davis to push for reform of the treaty, which allows the US to extradite British citizens far more easily than Britain can extradite Americans.
Mr Lynch, who was controversially extradited to the US last year to face criminal charges, was cleared on Thursday by a San Francisco jury after an 11-week trial over his role in the sale of his business.
Mr Davis, who spoke to Mr Lynch in the wake of his acquittal, said: “He said: ‘David, we’ve got work to do to put this extradition treaty right.’”
The former Secretary of State said: “It highlights a massively dysfunctional arrangement we have with this extradition treaty. I’ve always been pretty clear, in my mind, that this was a bogus case.”
Mr Lynch had faced up to 25 years in prison over claims he had masterminded a “multi-year, multi-layered fraud” to boost Autonomy’s value before its sale to HP for $11bn (£8.6bn) in 2011.
The Cambridge entrepreneur, at one stage dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates”, had always denied wrongdoing and fought a bitter extradition battle after being charged by the US government in 2018, insisting his case should have been dealt with in the UK.
But his appeal against extradition was denied and, despite a campaign by former ministers, was signed off by then-Home Secretary Priti Patel in 2022.
Mr Davis, who signed a letter in 2021 opposing Mr Lynch’s extradition, told The Telegraph the entrepreneur was now planning an effort to oppose Britain’s Tony Blair-era extradition deal with the US.
Mr Davis said: “[This happened] in the aftermath of 9/11 – nobody thought about it properly. The Home Office didn’t think about it properly.
“This extradition treaty really cannot be allowed to live after this.”
Sir Vince Cable, the former Liberal Democrat Business Secretary who also signed a letter in support of Mr Lynch, said: “It is clearly a one-sided arrangement. Out of self respect Britain needs to put its foot down.”
Mr Davis previously spoke out about the UK’s extradition deal with the US after the death of British teenager Harry Dunn, who was killed by a car driven by American intelligence official Anne Sacoolas in 2019.
Sacoolas fled to the US on diplomatic immunity and pleaded guilty to causing death by careless driving, but never returned to the UK. The US refused to send her.
Mr Davis said that the extradition deal, “in the case of foreign defendants, [is] hopelessly unfair”.
Autonomy, a FTSE 100 software business, was sold to US giant HP 13 years ago but the transaction quickly went sour. HP wrote off billions of dollars before accusing Mr Lynch of fraud.
During the trial, Mr Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former vice president of finance, faced claims they had artificially bolstered the company’s revenues. Both were cleared.
In a high-risk move, Mr Lynch took to the witness stand to defend his record during the trial. He told the jury he had mostly been involved in “the vision of the technology” and not in the minutiae of accounting decisions.
The entrepreneur, who also launched investment firm Invoke Capital and was the founding investor of Darktrace, argued HP had simply botched the transaction – with “chaos and paralysis” for weeks, he said.
Brent Hoberman, the founder of Lastminute.com and another opponent of Mr Lynch’s extradition, said: “The one-sided extradition treaty does not make sense.
“For a UK citizen to go through something like that and have his life put on hold for 10 years, and have no support from the UK government, is not great.”
The Home Office was contacted for comment.
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