Mike Lynch was a star of the British tech sector who – as we’ve mentioned in previous posts – attracted comparisons to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
But he also suffered a sudden and dramatic fall from grace.
In 1996, he established Autonomy, a company that built software to help businesses manage and sift through data. In 2011, it was bought by the US giant Hewlett-Packard in a deal that valued the business at $11bn (£8.6bn).
That made Lynch a very rich man.
But it rapidly turned sour. Little more than a year later, HP said it had found evidence of accounting “irregularities” at Autonomy that had been used to make it appear a much more attractive prospect financially.
This led to a decade of legal wrangling and last year, Lynch was extradited to the US to face criminal fraud charges. He was acquitted in June.
The excursion aboard the Bayesian was meant to be a celebration of that victory. It ended in tragedy.
