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.
But the fate of Ebbers is one of innumerable cautionary tales for Lynch. Over here, complex fraud cases often collapse, hung up on nuances of law and mountains of evidence, as justice grinds slowly but fairly. Over there, the odds are loaded against white-collar defendants, who face such vast legal costs that plea-bargaining is frequently the only viable option.
Data from Pew Research Center shows that in 2022, only 290 of 71,954 defendants in federal criminal cases – 0.4 per cent – were acquitted at trial, while 1,379 were convicted; of the rest, nine out of ten pleaded guilty. Lynch is up against an overall conviction rate of 91.4 per cent.
The prosecution says he was ‘the driving force’ behind a ‘multiyear, multilayered fraud’ that gulled HP into overpaying by billions. The defence will say HP destroyed that value itself by mismanaging an acquisition it did not fully understand, then scapegoated Mike Lynch.
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