Is the airline ‘booking surge’ a load of hot air?

Be glad you’re not in Dr Mike Lynch’s shoes. A London judge has ruled that the founder of the Cambridge-based software venture Autonomy can be extradited to the US to face multiple fraud charges in relation to the takeover of Autonomy in 2011 by Hewlett-Packard of California. This was, undoubtedly, a disastrous purchase: HP paid a huge premium over Autonomy’s market value, swiftly found all was not as expected, wrote off most of the $11 billion price and accused Lynch of having artificially inflated the company’s numbers. His fate now hangs in the legal balance.

The Serious Fraud Office looked at the file but dropped it on grounds of insufficient evidence; meanwhile, judgment in a £3.8 billion civil action against Lynch is not due until September. But US prosecutors have pressed their case under a 2003 UK-US extradition treaty, which made it sufficient for the US merely to assert allegations rather than provide prima facie evidence when requesting an extradition from the UK.