Hailed as Britain's Bill Gates, Lynch sold Autonomy, his groundbreaking data-management company, to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion.
Shareholders and business commentators were puzzled about what HP, a hardware company, would do with Autonomy, a software company — and why the latter was worth $11 billion.
A year after the acquisition, HP wrote down $8.8 billion of the purchase value and accused Lynch of lying about Autonomy's finances.
Lynch said HP stifled Autonomy with mismanagement and bureaucracy that pushed out employees and stymied sales.
"This verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP's well-documented ineptitude on Dr. Lynch," Morvillo said in a joint statement with his attorney colleague Brian Heberlig.
Persons:
—, Mike Lynch, Bill Gates, Lynch, Sushovan Hussain, Stephen Chamberlain, Chamberlain, Chris Morvillo, Léo Apotheker, Apotheker, Meg Whitman, James B, Stewart, Time Warner, Bryn Colton, Hussain, hadn't, Henry Nicholls, David Cameron, Cameron, Lynch —, Whitman, Apotheker's, Robert Hildyard, Hildyard hadn't, wasn't, that'd, Guglielmo Mangiapane Morvillo, Morvillo, Brian Heberlig, Angela Bacares, Hannah, Charles Morvillo
Organizations:
Service, Autonomy, Hewlett, Packard, HP, Business, Cambridge University, Cambridge, Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, Shareholders, New York Times, Time, FBI, Deloitte, Telegraph, The New York Times, KPMG, US Justice Department, Justice Department, High Court, REUTERS, BBC, British Museum, Politico, The Times, Times, Bacares
Locations:
San Francisco, London, California, Kenya, Sicily