Who is Mike Lynch? Profile of tech tycoon missing after Sicily yacht sinking
Through a decades-long rise to the top, Mike Lynch established himself as one of the key figures of the UK tech industry - and was frequently referred to as "the British Bill Gates".
But the moment which should have been his greatest triumph was tainted by controversy, as the multi-billion dollar sale of his firm Autonomy to Hewlett Packard became the subject of a fraud trial.
Mr Lynch, 59, was cleared of all charges earlier this year - a result which brought to an end a legal battle that had hung over him for 13 years.
ITV News looks at the twists and turns of how Mike Lynch - now one of six people missing after the sinking of a yacht off the coast of Sicily - became one of Britain's biggest business success stories.
Who is Mike Lynch?
Mike Lynch was born in 1965 and grew up near Chelmsford in Essex. His mother was a nurse and his father was a fireman and in an interview with the Daily Mail in 2012 he said he had a "modest upbringing".
He won a scholarship to the private Bancroft’s School in Woodford aged 11 and later went on to read natural science at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
He followed this with a PhD in mathematical computing and then took a research fellowship.
One of his first businesses in the 80s was Lynett Systems which produced software for the music industry.
He later founded Cambridge Neurodynamics, a firm that would go on to develop fingerprint recognition.
Mr Lynch is married with two children and is reported to spend his spare time building model railways and breeding koi carp.
He lives at Loudham Hall in Suffolk, a Georgian manor house set in 70 acres of countryside with a swimming pool, four cottages and a lodge.
The latest Sunday Times Rich List puts the combined fortune of Mr Lynch and his wife Angela Bacares, who has been rescued from the yacht in Sicily, at £500m, a fall of £352m over the past year.
The rise of Autonomy
Autonomy was founded in Cambridge in 1996 as a spin-off from Cambridge Neurodynamics.
The enterprise software company developed technology allowing it to search unstructured data such as texts, voice mails and video.
At the heart of its technology was a statistical method of analysis known as Bayesian inference - a name Mr Lynch borrowed for the name of the yacht from which he went missing in Sicily.
Autonomy was a pioneer of business data analysis, using machine learning and what Mr Lynch called “adaptive pattern recognition”.
By 1998, it had floated in Brussels, and rode the technology "dot-com" boom around the turn of the millennium. In 2000 it gained listings on both the US Nasdaq exchange and later the London Stock Exchange.
When the tech bubble burst, Autonomy struggled, dropping out of the FTSE 100. But the company was already profitable, unlike many other tech firms at the time, and rode the storm.
Over the next decade, it continued to grow and served vast swathes of the businesses world, with clients reportedly including Shell, BMW, the UK Parliament and several US government departments.
In 2011, Autonomy was becoming known outside of industry circles, raising its profile through sponsorship deals with the likes of the Mercedes F1 team and Tottenham Hotspur.
Mr Lynch himself was also being recognised personally.
In 2006 he was made an OBE for services to enterprise in 2006. That same year, he was appointed to the board of the BBC, and was later elected to then-prime minister David Cameron’s council for science and technology in 2011.
Fraud trial
Autonomy, the company founded by Mike Lynch, was once seen as one of the brightest stars in the UK tech firmament - with a reputation that soon drew the attention of US firms.
Silicon Valley giant Hewlett Packard paid $11bn (£8.64bn) for the company in 2011 but very quickly wrote down its value to just a fraction of that price.
It then claimed that Mr Lynch and its former chief financial officer had over-inflated the price of the firm for their own profit.
In 2022, Hewlett Packard won its civil case in the UK, opening the door to Mr Lynch being extradited to the US to face criminal charges.
Following an 11-week trial earlier this year, Mr Lynch was cleared of on all 15 felony counts over the company sale.
He faced more than 20 years in US prison if convicted of the fraud and conspiracy allegations.
In his first interview after being cleared, the 59-year-old father of two told the newspaper: “I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone, because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back.
“I have various medical things that would have made it difficult to survive.”
He reportedly told the paper that, if convicted, he was unlikely to live to see freedom because of his age and serious lung condition.
Describing the moment the verdicts were returned, he said: “When you hear that answer, you jump universes.
“If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense.”
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