Who is Mike Lynch, the UK tech boss missing in superyacht sinking? | Autonomy

Mike Lynch, the software program millionaire lacking after the sinking of a superyacht off the coast of Sicily, is likely one of the few examples of a UK entrepreneur who has created a worldwide expertise firm.

That truth has led to seemingly compulsory descriptions of him as “Britain’s Invoice Gates” however, in reality, his story differs vastly from that of the Microsoft founder.

Lower than three months in the past, the 59-year-old was cleared of 15 counts of fraud he had confronted within the US over the $11.1bn buy of his firm, Autonomy, by the Silicon Valley large Hewlett-Packard in 2011, a case he feared would finish with him dying in jail due to a lung situation.

“I’ve varied medical issues that will have made it very troublesome to outlive”, Lynch advised the Sunday Occasions final month. “If this had gone the fallacious method, it could have been the top of life as I’ve recognized it in any sense.”

Born in Eire, Lynch was raised close to Chelmsford in Essex, the place his mom was a nurse and his father a firefighter.

He studied physics, arithmetic and biochemistry at Cambridge College, finally specialising in adaptive sample recognition. His doctoral thesis is reportedly one of the crucial broadly learn items of analysis within the college library.

After launching a couple of early expertise startups – together with one which specialised in automated number-plate, fingerprint and facial recognition software program for the police – he created Autonomy in 1996.

Its software program was utilized by firms to analyse big caches of information and partly owed its efficacy to Bayesian inference, a statistical idea devised by the 18th-century statistician, thinker and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes.

The superyacht that sank off Sicily throughout a violent storm within the early hours of Monday was known as Bayesian.

Autonomy was an nearly fast enterprise success. The corporate floated in Brussels in 1998, and speedy development coupled with the dotcom increase would result in a transfer to the London Inventory Change, the place Autonomy joined the FTSE 100 of high UK-listed firms.

Lynch’s triumphs led to him turning into a science adviser to David Cameron when he was prime minister and a non-executive director of the BBC, in addition to receiving an OBE in 2006 for providers to enterprise.

Nevertheless, whereas Autonomy impressed HP sufficient to pay greater than $11bn for the corporate in 2011, it solely took a yr for the US computing large to take an $8.8bn writedown on its acquisition, saying it had found “critical accounting improprieties” on the UK firm.

Lynch had successfully been concerned in defending his repute ever since – with the legacy of the claims persevering with to have ramifications regardless of the entrepreneur at all times denying the allegations of wrongdoing.

Autonomy’s former finance director, Sushovan Hussain, was sentenced to 5 years in jail within the US after being convicted in 2018 of fraud in relation to the HP deal.

In 2022, Lynch misplaced a civil fraud case introduced by HP within the UK, throughout which it was mentioned that the businessman exerted management over Hussain and that it was inconceivable that Autonomy’s founder was unaware of the fraudulent practices alleged to have taken place at his firm.

Mr Justice Hildyard, the excessive courtroom choose within the case, had been resulting from rule on HP’s declare for $4bn in damages and had mentioned the quantity he meant to award can be a lot decrease. Lynch had mentioned he meant to enchantment in opposition to the ruling.

On the firms he ran, Lynch is alleged to have put his personal private stamp, indulging his penchant for James Bond. Convention rooms had been reportedly named after Bond enemies, corresponding to Dr No and Goldfinger, and Autonomy even had a piranha tank within the atrium, in a nod to the 007 caper You Solely Dwell Twice.

This skilled portrait of Lynch appears barely at odds with what is understood about him personally: married, with two daughters, he was reported to spend his spare time constructing mannequin railways and breeding koi carp.

Since being acquitted within the US, he had mentioned he deliberate to handle the imbalance he perceived within the extradition treaty between the UK and the US. “It needs to be fallacious {that a} US prosecutor has extra energy over a British citizen residing in England than the UK police do,” he mentioned.

He and his spouse, Angela Bacares, who was reported to have been rescued from the Bayesian, had been mentioned to be value £500m on this yr’s Sunday Occasions Wealthy Record.

One in all Lynch’s daughters, aged 18, can be understood to be among the many 4 Britons lacking after the yacht sank. Two Individuals and a Canadian individual are additionally lacking.