Inside the lifetime of sensible and eccentric Mike Lynch

As a mathematician whose particular expertise was probability, Mike Lynch prided himself on defying the odds.

The nerdy multi-millionaire entrepreneur – dubbed ‘Britain’s Bill Gates‘ – even named his superyacht after the ‘Bayesian’ statistical theory on which he built his software fame and fortune.

He boasted that he created a software empire by ignoring conventional business wisdom – and in June he defied conventional legal wisdom that says you can’t beat US federal prosecutors when he was acquitted on all counts in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever fraud trials.

Yet surely even Lynch might have discounted the odds, just two months after being spared spending the rest of his life in a US prison, of dying when a freak Mediterranean ‘tornado’ sank his yacht.

The 184ft Bayesian, named after the 18th century English clergyman and statistician Thomas Bayes, sank off the Sicily coast.

Lynch was last night among six missing passengers, including one of his two daughters, 18-year-old Hannah.

His wife Angela, the yacht’s registered owner, was among the survivors.

Lynch’s presumed death would be the cruellest twist of fate given that less than a month ago he was telling an interviewer of his fears when he left the UK for California – where he spent 13 months under house arrest awaiting trial – that he’d never come home.

He was charged with 15 counts of fraud and conspiracy over the £8.6 billion sale of his business software company, Autonomy, to US computer giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011.

Instead, he said in the interview, he was looking forward to seeing his daughters, and returning to his cherished Suffolk farm and the five dogs he named after engineering parts, including Switch and Valve.

Aged 59 and facing a maximum 25-year sentence, Lynch – whose family is estimated to be worth £500 million – had admitted that a serious lung condition made it unlikely that he’d have come out of prison alive.

At one point in the interview, he was so overcome by his reversal of fortune that he became tearful – something that inspired his interviewer to describe him, somewhat unfortunately, as like a ‘cork bobbing on an ocean of relief’.

He told the Sunday Times: ‘It’s a very strange situation to now be in a different mindset where you’re back.

‘I stood on Piccadilly Circus the other day, which has the most enormous permanent traffic jam, and I’m thinking: ‘This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

He added: ‘It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?’

His relief at his unexpected freedom – less than 0.5 per cent of US federal criminal cases end in acquittal, and many had urged him to accept a plea deal – had been mixed with anger at his treatment by the US, which hauled him off across the Atlantic in chains. 

Having always rejected accusations that he cooked the books at his company to make it appear more attractive to Hewlett-Packard, he’d spent 12 years fighting extradition and trial in America.

Lynch had been looking forward not only to getting back to running his businesses and the farm where he raises rare breed pigs and cattle, but to adding his voice to the growing fury over the wildly uneven extradition arrangements between the US and the UK.

The deal has allowed Washington to refuse to hand over American Anne Sacoolas, who admitted driving on the wrong side of the road when she killed 19-year-old Harry Dunn outside an airbase in Northamptonshire, but has compelled the UK to hand over a string of British white-collar suspects over US-based offences.

‘It has to be wrong that a US prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England than UK police do,’ Lynch said.

The prosecution of Mike Lynch OBE signalled a monumental fall from grace of a man who had been an adviser to David Cameron’s government, a member of the BBC’s executive board and Deputy Lieutenant of Suffolk.

The son of working-class Irish immigrants, he was brought up in Essex, where his father was a fireman and his mother a nurse. 

His first job was cleaning floors in the hospital where his mother worked. He won a scholarship to a private school and a place at Cambridge University, where he later studied for a PhD in mathematical computing, specialising in developing ways of spotting patterns in vast amounts of data.

Lynch started his first company in the late 1980s with just £2,000. 

In 1996, he established Autonomy, which soon became a leading light of Silicon Fen, the nickname for the cluster of tech companies around Cambridge. It was a rare homegrown British tech success.

B y 2010, the company was so successful that Lynch was in a position to sign a £20 million sponsorship deal with Tottenham Hotspur.

Despite his background as a boffin, Lynch had a reputation as a tough and driven boss – he preferred to call himself ‘hard-charging’ – whose sharp edges were softened by eccentricity.

He was, for instance, a James Bond obsessive who drove the same Aston Martin DB5 model as 007 and named conference rooms at companies he ran after Bond villains such as Goldfinger and Dr No. Lynch even installed a piranha tank – a feature of the Bond film You Only Live Twice – in his office atrium.

Prosecutors, keen to portray him as a man who ran his business empire like a Mafia godfather, pointed out how much he liked to joke about crime.

Their evidence included a 2005 corporate video for Autonomy sales staff in which he pretended to be a Mob boss named ‘Big Mike’, taking a conference call with under-bosses – his company lieutenants – dressed in Mafia-style fedoras. 

One became so angry about their minions’ failure to ‘collect’ that he smashed his phone with a baseball bat.

A year after Hewlett-Packard (HP) bought Autonomy, it announced it had written down its value by £5.5 billion after uncovering ‘serious accounting improprieties’ for which it claimed Lynch – who personally had made $516 million from the sale – was ultimately responsible.

Although Lynch insisted that the struggling HP simply suffered a bad attack of buyer’s remorse having knowingly paid well over the odds, prosecutors accused him of ‘artificially inflating’ his company’s balance sheets and falsifying its accounts – intimidating or sacking anyone who challenged them.

His position was significantly weakened by HP winning a civil court case against him in London’s High Court in 2022 and by Autonomy’s finance chief, Sushovan Hussain, being found guilty on similar charges in the US and sentenced to five years in prison.

Lynch later admitted that Hussain’s trial proved a godsend by forewarning his lawyers on how the prosecution would argue its case.

Defendants are rarely advised to take the stand in criminal cases, but the self-confident Lynch once again defied convention and did so towards the end of his largely stodgy 12-week trial.

Until the judge ruled that the court had heard ‘enough farm stories’, Lynch treated jurors – at least one of whom was reported to have previously fallen asleep – to long stories about his passion for conserving rare breeds of farm animals.

Observers judged that Lynch’s risky decision had helped humanise him to a jury that had been told relentlessly that he was just a thuggish and ruthless fraudster.

‘I have various medical things that would have made it very difficult to survive,’ Lynch said in his interview last month about his trial. ‘If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.’

His reprieve, it increasingly appears, was tragically brief.