Estate of tycoon who died in luxury yacht tragedy ordered to pay billions to Silicon Valley giant

Sydney Morning Herald

23-07-2025

Mike Lynch's estate has been effectively bankrupted after being ordered to pay more than £700 million ($1.44 billion) in a fraud case over the late British tycoon's business dealings.
A High Court judge ruled that Hewlett Packard is owed almost £740 million over the fraudulent sale of Lynch's software business Autonomy in 2011.
The ruling comes 11 months after Lynch and his daughter Hannah died in a freak storm that sank his Bayesian superyacht.
The decision means the software boss would be expected to pass nothing to his widow and surviving daughter, unless the ruling is successfully appealed. His widow, Angela Bacares, has her own assets that are legally separate from her late husband's estate and will not be affected by the ruling.
Bacares's stake in technology company Darktrace was worth more than £127 million before the business's sale last year, even after she had sold hundreds of millions of pounds of shares.
Lynch sold Autonomy to HP for £7 billion in what was the biggest ever acquisition of a British technology company, but the Silicon Valley giant later accused him of fraud and sued him in the High Court.
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He was found liable in 2022, but the long-running case was thrown into limbo by his death off the coast of Sicily in August last year. Lynch, 59, and Hannah were among seven who died when the Bayesian capsized.
The software entrepreneur had been on holiday to celebrate his acquittal in a criminal trial linked to the disastrous sale of Autonomy.