How Mike Lynch’s co-defendant in fraud trial died inside hours of him

For avid ultra-runner Stephen Chamberlain, the morning had started with one of his usual trails through the Cambridgeshire countryside.

The Strava exercise-monitoring app he was using reveals he had jogged 6.4 miles in an hour last Saturday morning, on a route that took him along the Black Fen Waterway Trail beside the River Great Ouse. The weather was good.

Chamberlain, an accountant and technology company executive, had taken up ultra-running – sometimes competing in races of up to 230 miles – since facing the immense pressure of becoming a defendant in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest and longest-running fraud cases.

Only weeks earlier, he and co-defendant Mike Lynch, the multi-millionaire tech rock-star hailed as ‘Britain’s Bill Gates‘ had sensationally been acquitted on all charges in a San Francisco court, after the jury at their 11-week trial rejected the US government’s claim that they had cooked the books over the £8.6 billion sale of Lynch’s company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.

Chamberlain, 52, whose career had been put on hold after he was forced to go on ‘administrative leave’ in June last year, was looking forward to new work challenges and spending more time with wife Karen and children, Ella and Teddy.

It was not to be. At about 10.10am, as he emerged on to the busy Newmarket Road, he was struck by a blue Vauxhall Corsa and fatally injured.

The Mail has analysed the route he was taking, as revealed by his Strava app. At the point the car hit him, the trail Chamberlain had been running on emerges via a narrow footpath on to the A1123, a single carriageway, where the speed limit is normally 60mph.

At this point, between the villages of Stretham and Wicken, the road crosses over the River Great Ouse via a humpback bridge.

To cross at this point, pedestrians must step over a barrier. Drivers approaching the bridge from Stretham (to the north-west) might find their visibility limited, while those coming from Wicken must round a slight bend.

It is, in short, a potentially dangerous place to cross, even in good weather.

The Corsa’s driver, a 49-year-old woman who lives in the neighbouring village of Haddenham, stopped at the scene and assisted police with their inquiries. Police say there was no evidence the incident was ‘suspicious or untoward’.

Chamberlain – who lived in nearby Longstanton – was taken to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge where he underwent treatment for his injuries and was placed on life support, but was declared dead on Monday night.

By then, however, an extraordinary and similarly tragic coincidence had occurred hundreds of miles away. For some, it has placed Chamberlain’s death in a new and sinister light.

Around dawn that same Monday, Mike Lynch’s 184ft £30 million super-yacht Bayesian had sunk off the coast of Sicily, claiming his life and those of six other people.

Lynch had arranged the Mediterranean jaunt to celebrate his US legal victory and new-found freedom with family, friends and people who’d played key roles in his acquittal – including the head of his defence team and a banker who’d been a character witness.

Until now, Chamberlain’s role in the long-running Autonomy saga has gone largely unnoticed, overshadowed by the larger-than-life Lynch, with his passions for James Bond and breeding rare cows.

However, while it seems unlikely for even the most nefarious actors to have successfully arranged for a freak tornado to sink a yacht in the Mediterranean and orchestrate a fatal road collision in the UK, that hasn’t stopped feverish social media speculation that the deaths were in some way connected.

Speculation was fuelled by reports this week that Darktrace, the cybersecurity company co-founded by Lynch where Chamberlain (after leaving Autonomy) was chief finance officer and then chief operating officer, has deep ties to UK and US intelligence.

One of Darktrace’s co-founders, Stephen Huxter, was a senior member of MI5’s cyber defence team and he hired GCHQ veteran Andrew France as chief executive.

Ex-MI5 director general Jonathan Evans and Jim Penrose, formerly one of the bosses of America’s National Security Agency, were also on the board. Further muddying the waters, Lynch’s first company Cambridge Neurodynamics, which specialised in computerised fingerprint recognition, held contracts with UK intelligence agencies.

Autonomy, which he founded in 1996, also had obvious intelligence potential as it produced software that could analyse data from sources such as intercepted phone calls and emails.

It was rumoured to have the US and UK intelligence services among its clients.

Quite why these links to US and UK intelligence might have endangered the men’s lives following their acquittals in court is not clear. Nor, indeed, is why anyone else might want them dead.

Moreover, Chamberlain’s background was far removed from the world of spooks. He studied mechanical engineering and management at Birmingham University before becoming a chartered accountant.

He joined Autonomy in 2005: a high-pressure workplace under Lynch, a driven and exacting boss. After HP bought Autonomy in 2011, Chamberlain left the company and went to work for Sepura, a ‘secure communications company’ based near Cambridge.

L ynch, meanwhile, co-founded Darktrace and in 2016 brought in Chamberlain as chief financial officer. That year, the public-spirited Chamberlain – whose social media posts are peppered with contributions to charity – volunteered to be the unpaid finance director of League One football club Cambridge United, a role he performed until 2018.

Club director Graham Daniels said this week that Chamberlain, who grew up six miles from Cambridge, ‘was a winner in all sorts of ways. He cared for people and knew when to put people first.’

But in 2018, US prosecutors claimed Chamberlain, who owned around 99,000 Autonomy shares, had made $4 million from the company’s sale to HP.

In November 2018 US prosecutors charged Lynch and Chamberlain with wire fraud and conspiracy. They accused them of ‘artificially inflating’ Autonomy’s balance sheet and falsifying its accounts to boost the company’s perceived performance, condition and prospects.

While Lynch fought for years to avoid extradition, Chamberlain surrendered to the US authorities, presenting himself in court in early 2019 and securing a lenient deal which allowed him to travel freely between the US and UK.

Gary Lincenberg, Chamberlain’s trial lawyer, said his client was a ‘courageous man’ with ‘real backbone and integrity’ who knew that only a fraction of defendants prosecuted by federal prosecutors in criminal trials ever win, prompting many to agree a plea deal.

He told the Mail: ‘Steve was of the view: ‘I’m not going to accept a settlement that requires me to admit something that’s not true.’ I don’t think I know of anyone I admire more than Steve.’

Lincenberg said it was ‘unfathomable’ and ‘hard to process’ that the two defendants had died within hours of each other.

After their acquittal, Lynch said that he had been granted a ‘second life’. Unbelievably, for both of them, that second life lasted little more than two months.