The 59-year-old co-founder of business software firm Autonomy sold his company to US tech giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $11.7bn (€10.6bn) and found himself facing conspiracy and fraud charges in the US.
Mike Lynch was on board the yacht, the Bayesian, which sank overnight off the coast of Sicily.
The tech tycoon had only returned to the UK in June after spending 13 months fighting the US justice system against charges of conspiracy and wire fraud connected with the sale of his company to Hewlett-Packard (HP).
He would have faced up to 25 years in prison had he been found guilty.
The charges followed HP claiming Lynch had effectively overcharged them by $5bn (€4.5bn) and requested his extradition for trial in the US. Lynch was to spend 12 years fighting the extradition until he was finally forced to fly over to the US in May 2023 to face charges and await trial.
A 13-month house arrest in California
He was placed under house arrest in San Francisco for 13 months until his trial, which lasted for 12 weeks. With less than 0.5% of federal criminal cases in the US ending in acquittal, the odds for Lynch did not look good.
Lynch always insisted he was not guilty and said that HP was trying to blame him for “buyers’ remorse”. In other words, he explained, the company was regretting how much it had paid for but that was their choice and, he insisted, it was neither conspiracy nor fraud.
The legal fight took more than a decade; encompassed a long-running civil fraud trial in the UK that saw damages awarded to HP; and cost Lynch more than $30m (€27.2m) but, on 6 June 2024, he was cleared of all 15 charges.
On 27 July, Lynch gave an exclusive interview to The Times, explaining his defence against the accusations, the court case and the millions of documents produced as evidence. He told how he had insisted on putting himself on the stand to show he was not the “pantomime villain” the prosecutors wished him to seem.
The decision proved to be the right one. Lynch’s head lawyer, Brian Heberlig, said in his closing argument: “This was the prosecutor’s moment to go right for the jugular with the best evidence he had to prove that Mike Lynch was guilty. What happened? You witnessed it. He reviewed a chronology of documents, with no probing questions.”
“It takes an exponential leap, not justified by the evidence, to conclude that Mike committed fraud,” he said.
Finally allowed to return to the UK
The married father of two was free to come home. In the same interview, The Times’ Danny Fortson, who had followed the proceeds since the beginning, wrote that he had the sense that Lynch was “emerging from something akin to a near-death experience”.
Lynch responded: “That is very much how I handled it”.
“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?”