‘Britain’s Bill Gates’: Who is Mike Lynch, the UK tech entrepreneur missing after superyacht sinks?
Mike Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy. He was acquitted of fraud charges in June after defending himself in a trial over allegations that he artificially inflated Autonomy’s value in an $11.7 billion sale to tech giant Hewlett Packard.
Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images
LONDON — British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges in June in a landmark trial over allegations made by Hewlett Packard that he had artificially inflated the value of his company when he sold it to the U.S. enterprise tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.
Just two months after his acquittal, Lynch — who was once lauded by the U.K. national press as “Britain’s Bill Gates” — was reported missing Monday after the sinking of a superyacht off the coast of Sicily.
The yacht, called the Bayesian, capsized at around 4 a.m. local time while anchored off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village located in the province of Palermo in Italy. It was struck by an unexpectedly violent storm, according to local media reports.
Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, is among the 15 people who were rescued after the yacht’s collapse. At least one man has died, while six people — including Lynch’s daughter Hannah — remain unaccounted for, officials have said.
Sicily’s civil protection agency told reporters late Monday that Morgan Stanley International chairman, Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda were also missing as difficult search and rescue efforts resumed on Tuesday.
In a separate incident Saturday, Stephen Chamberlain, the former vice president of finance at Autonomy and a co-defendant in Lynch’s trial, died after being “fatally struck” by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire, Chamberlain’s lawyer told Reuters news agency.
Who is Mike Lynch?
Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy. He also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups, which he founded in 2012.
He became the target of a protracted legal battle with Hewlett Packard after the technology firm accused Lynch of inflating Autonomy’s value in an $11.7 billion sale. HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on the value of Autonomy within a year of buying it.
Lynch was extradited from Britain to the U.S. last year to stand trial over the HP allegations. He faced criminal charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly scheming to inflate Autonomy’s revenue starting in 2009 in a bid to entice a buyer.
But two months ago, Lynch, who has long denied the accusations, was acquitted of fraud charges in a surprise victory following the trial, which lasted for three months.
During the trial, Lynch took the stand in his own defense, denying wrongdoing and telling jurors that HP botched Autonomy’s integration.
Prosecutors had alleged Lynch, along with Autonomy’s now-deceased finance executive Chamberlain, padded Autonomy’s finances in a number of ways.
These included back-dated agreements and so-called “round-tripping” deals that sought to artificially inflate Autonomy’s sales by fronting cash cash to customers through fake contracts.
Lynch told jurors that he was focused on technology-related matters at Autonomy and left accounting and money decisions to the company’s then-chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain.
Hussain was separately convicted in the U.S. in 2018 on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud related to the HP deal. He was released from prison in January after serving a five-year sentence.
‘Britain’s Bill Gates’
Lynch was born in Ilford, a large town in East London, in 1965 and grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex.
He attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences, focusing on areas including electronics, mathematics and biology. After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch completed a Ph.D. in signals processing and communications.
Toward the end of the 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd., a firm which produced designs and audio products for the music industry.
A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition business called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted the South Yorkshire Police among its customers.
But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he co-founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spinoff from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company scaled into one of Britain’s biggest tech firms.
Lynch held a lot of influence in the U.K. technology sphere at the height of his success, having once been dubbed Britain’s Bill Gates by the media.
He was previously on the board of U.K. broadcaster BBC. He also once served as an advisor to the British government on the Council for Science and Technology.
In his role as head of venture firm Invoke, Lynch was closely involved in helping British cybersecurity firm Darktrace and legal software startup Luminance get off the ground, backing both firms with sizable sums of cash.
Publicly-listed Darktrace, which had fended off similar allegations of inflating its revenues by U.S. short seller Quintessential Capital Management (QCM), earlier this year agreed a deal to bought out and taken private by U.S. private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion in cash.
Lynch previously made the Forbes’ billionaires list in 2014 and 2015, with an estimate net worth of $1 billion, according to the business news outlet. However, while facing legal costs in the dispute with HP, he dropped off the list in 2016.
Legal struggles aside, Lynch has several hobbies to keep him busy, including keeping and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.
“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn during an interview. “I have cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has kept since the medieval times and none of them have any Apple products whatsoever.”
Lynch reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk, a county in the East of England, to recover from his U.S. legal battle, the local East Anglian Times newspaper reported.
Weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch told The Times newspaper of how he feared dying in prison if found guilty over the HP allegations.
“‘If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense,” Lynch said in the interview with The Times.
“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life – the question is, what do you want to do with it?” he added.
Technology
Amazon launches fixed pricing for treatment of conditions such as hair loss. Hims & Hers stock drops 15%
Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.
Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.
Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.
“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.
“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.
“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”
Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.
“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.
‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’
Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.
She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”
She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”
Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.
“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.
Technology
SoftBank-backed fintech Zopa aims to double profit this year as it eyes 2025 current account launch
Jaidev Janardana, CEO of U.K. digital bank Zopa.
Zopa
LISBON, Portugal — British online lender Zopa is on track to double profits and increase annual revenue by more than a third this year amid bumper demand for its banking services, the company’s CEO told CNBC.
Zopa posted revenues of £222 million ($281.7 million) in 2023 and is expecting to cross the £300 million revenue milestone this year — that would mark a 35% annual jump.
The 2024 estimates are based on unaudited internal figures.
The firm also says it is on track to increase pre-tax profits twofold in 2024, after hitting £15.8 million last year.
Zopa, a regulated bank that is backed by Japanese giant SoftBank, has plans to venture into the world of current accounts next year as it looks to focus more on new products.
The company currently offers credit cards, personal loans and savings accounts that it offers through a mobile app — similar to other digital banks such as Monzo and Revolut which don’t operate physical branches.
“The business is doing really well. In 2024, we’ve hit or exceeded the plans across all metrics,” CEO Jaidev Janardana told CNBC in an interview Wednesday.
He said the strong performance is coming off the back of gradually improving sentiment in the U.K. economy, where Zopa operates exclusively.
Commenting on Britain’s macroeconomic conditions, Janardana said, “While it has been a rough few years, in terms of consumers, they have continued to feel the pain slightly less this year than last year.”
The market is “still tight,” he noted, adding that fintech offerings such as Zopa’s — which typically provide higher savings rates than high-street banks — become “more important” during such times.
“The proposition has become more relevant, and while it’s tight for customers, we have had to be much more constrained in terms of who we can lend to,” he said, adding that Zopa has still been able to grow despite that.
A big priority for the business going forward is product, Janardana said. The firm is developing a current account product which would allow users to spend and manage their money more easily, in a similar fashion to mainstream banking providers like HSBC and Barclays, as well as fintech upstarts such as Monzo.
“We believe that there is more that the consumer can have in the current account space,” Janardana said. “We expect that we will launch our current account with the general public sometime next year.”
Janardana said consumers can expect a “slick” experience from Zopa’s current account offering, including the ability to view and manage multiple account bank accounts from one interface and access to competitive savings rates.
IPO ‘not top of mind’
Zopa is one of many fintech companies that has been viewed as a potential IPO candidate. Around two years ago, the firm said that it was planning to go public, but later decided to put those plans on ice, as high interest rates battered technology stocks and the IPO market froze over in 2022.
Janardana said he doesn’t envision a public listing as an immediate priority, but noted he sees signs pointing toward a more favorable U.S. IPO market next year.
That should mean that Europe becomes more open to IPOs happening later in 2026, according to Janardana. He didn’t disclose where Zopa would end up going public.
“To be honest, it’s not the top of mind for me,” Janardana told CNBC. “I think we continue to be lucky to have supportive and long-term shareholders who support future growth as well.”
Last year, Zopa made two senior hires, appointing Peter Donlon, ex-chief technology officer at online card retailer Moonpig, as its own CTO. The firm also hired Kate Erb, a chartered accountant from KPMG, as its chief operating officer.
The company raised $300 million in a funding round led by Japanese tech investor SoftBank in 2021 and was last valued by investors at $1 billion.
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