Who is Mike Lynch? Missing British tech tycoon dubbed ‘UK Bill Gates’ | UK News

Mike Lynch, the British tech tycoon who sold his software startup to HP for £8.7 billion in 2011, disappeared after his Bayesian yacht sank off the coast of Sicily.

The businessman recently made headlines when Hewlett Packard (HP) accused him of persuading him to overpay for his company, Autonomy.

She is one of seven people missing when the £14million yacht sank after being hit by a heavy storm at about 5am.

He was extradited to the US in May last year where he was tried and acquitted of all 15 charges relating to the $11bn (£8.64bn) purchase of his company.

If found guilty, Lynch, 59, could have faced up to 25 years in prison, but he was acquitted just two months ago.

In 2006 he was awarded an OBE for services to entrepreneurship and later, in 2011, sat on the government’s Science and Technology Committee under David Cameron.

Mr Lynch was born in Ireland and grew up in Chelmsford, Essex, with his mother, a nurse, and his father, a firefighter.

He then studied physics, mathematics and biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, specialising in adaptive pattern recognition.

His doctoral dissertation is considered one of the most widely read research works in the university library.

After graduating, he founded several technology startups, including one specializing in software for automatic license plate generation, fingerprint recognition, and facial recognition for police.

Then, in 1996, he founded Autonomy, a company that produces software that helps organizations analyze huge amounts of data.

It owed its success in part to Bayesian inference, a statistical theory developed by the 18th-century statistician Thomas Bayes—the superyacht that sank was also called a Bayesian theory.

The Autonomy project was an immediate business success and was listed on the Brussels Stock Exchange in 1998.

Rapid growth, combined with the dotcom boom, led to the company moving to the London Stock Exchange. Autonomy then joined the FTSE 100 of the UK’s largest listed companies.

While HP was so impressed that it paid $11 billion for Autonomy in 2011, the American computer giant took an $8.8 billion write-down on the company a year later, claiming that Lynch’s company had “serious accounting irregularities.”

Since then, the tech entrepreneur has focused mainly on defending his reputation.

In his first interview since being cleared, Mr Lynch told The Sunday Times: “I had to say goodbye to everything and everyone because I didn’t know if I was ever going to come back.

“I have various medical conditions that could make survival difficult.”

He reportedly told the newspaper that if convicted, he likely would not live to see freedom due to his age and a serious lung condition.

Describing the moment the verdicts were announced, he said: “When you hear that answer, it’s like someone’s stepped over you.”

“If everything went wrong, it would be the end of my life as I knew it, in any sense.”

In an interview with The Sunday Times, he said he wanted to change the extradition treaty between the UK and the US and fund a British equivalent of the non-profit Innocence Project, which aims to free wrongly convicted people.

“It must be untrue that an American prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England than the British police.

“The system can wipe out individuals. There has to be a counter-option that says, ‘yes, the whole world thinks you’re guilty – but was that a fair conviction?'”

Police agreed to meet him around the corner from his Chelsea home where he was to be extradited, but once he was at Heathrow Airport, US police officers put him in the back row of a United Airlines plane and made him shackle himself, the newspaper reported.

Mr. Lynch said: “That’s ridiculous. You’re in chains, although, you know, what are you going to do?”

Outside of work, Mr. Lynch is married to Angela Bacares, with whom he has two children.

He tends to keep much of his private life a secret.

A total of 15 people were rescued from the superyacht, but Mr Lynch was not among them.

The body of a man, believed to be the ship’s chef, was found near the boat on the seabed, about half a mile from the Italian island’s largest city, Palermo.

Charlotte Golunski, a British mother who managed to save her one-year-old daughter from a sinking yacht, said the passengers were employees and associates of an IT company.

Among the missing people are four people of British origin, two Americans and one Canadian.

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