As I’ve said before, I hold no brief for Dr Mike Lynch, the founder of the Cambridge-based software firm Autonomy, who faces US fraud charges over the $11 billion takeover of his company by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011. But I watched with foreboding as US marshals bagged Lynch under the lopsided 2003 US-UK extradition treaty and flew him to California – after the then home secretary Priti Patel declined to halt the process – and a judge there changed his pre-agreed bail conditions to place him under armed house arrest.
Now, having comprehensively lost the argument that as a UK citizen running a UK company he should have been tried in British courts, Lynch is pleading ‘not guilty’ to a San Francisco jury. Still wealthy, he can afford the fanciest lawyer: Reid Weingarten has previously defended Jeffrey Epstein, Roman Polanski and Bernie Ebbers, the boss of the collapsed telecoms group WorldCom, who served 13 years of a 25-year sentence for fraud.
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