Irish Examiner view: Tech tycoon Mike Lynch took on the might of US corporate lawyers, and won
Mike Lynch was cleared of charges alleging that he orchestrated a fraud and conspiracy leading up to an $11bn deal that turned into a costly albatross for Silicon Valley pioneer Hewlett Packard. Picture: Yui Mok/PA
It is difficult not to admire the brio with which the flamboyant, extradited tech tycoon Mike Lynch took on the might of America’s corporate malfeasance lawyers and won an audacious victory.
In a country which loves the spectacle of boardroom executives being arraigned for financial misdeeds, preferably in handcuffs, Mr Lynch — who has been fighting his case in various forms for 13 years — made the calculated gamble of going into the witness box in San Francisco.
Mr Lynch, aged 57, the Essex-raised son of a nurse and a firefighter from Tipperary and Cork, launched a company in 1996 in Cambridge called Autonomy.
It developed an algorithm based on Bayesian mathematics which helped businesses retrieve information buried deep in emails and word documents.
Autonomy was once valued at around €50bn by some analysts, and the American computer giant Hewlett Packard — seeking to diversify away from its computer and printer business because of the impact of smartphones on its core market — thought it spotted a bargain.
From Palo Alto, a price of $11bn (around €11.2bn) seemed attractive in October 2011.
Yet, within seven months, HP fired Mike Lynch before writing down their acquisition by $8.8bn due to “extensive accounting errors and misrepresentations”.
Some 15 months ago, Mr Lynch lost a six-year civil case brought by HP in Britain.
During a 93-day hearing, Mr Lynch — who has denied any allegations of wrongdoing throughout — was in the witness box for 22 days, making it one of the longest cross-examinations in British legal history.
His experience before federal prosecutors in California was less protracted. He gave evidence, and was cross-examined for four days of an 11-week trial.
His acquittal is a remarkable redemption for the entrepreneur. The 15 charges of wire fraud and conspiracy he faced carried a potential prison sentence of up to 25 years.
Autonomy’s former vice-president of finance Stephen Chamberlain was also found not guilty on all counts.
Both men had faced 14 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.
An “elated” Mr Lynch, who fought extradition from Britain, chose to go into the witness box.
An unusual move in fraud trials, his decision was vindicated in a jurisdiction where the odds were against him. Fewer than 1% of US federal defendants are acquitted at trial. In nine out of 10 cases, they plead guilty.
He was seen wiping tears from his eyes after the verdict, having described the evidence offered against him as “surreal”, adding:
While Mr Lynch can return to his rare breeds farm in Suffolk, and make further use of the £500m (€580m) that he realised from the sale of Autonomy, the US prosecutors may be dwelling on a bad case of over-reach.
The Autonomy case is by no means the only fraud-related trial in which Irish people have been fighting to clear their names and overturn convictions.
Former Navillus president and CEO Dónal O’Sullivan, 62, along with the company’s financial controller, 52-year-old Pádraig Naughton, have been released from jail.
They had been serving sentences for payroll fraud, involving one of New York City’s biggest construction firms.
For Mike Lynch, the long walk to freedom has been concluded. For the Navillus defendants, who are appealing against their convictions, the struggle continues.
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Amidst the strenuous efforts in schools in Dublin, Kerry, and Co Wicklow to instil some self-discipline in young people over the pervasive use of smartphones, there is one tactic which does not receive the attention it deserves.
Why should teenagers, let alone children, exercise restraint when their parents set such a poor example?
It is not uncommon to visit restaurants, pubs, and resorts these days and witness whole families with their noses in various phones and tablets rather than communicating with each other.
What used to be an escape clause for dealing with a fractious toddler — a downloaded episode of Paw Patrol should do it — has become a default position for some, whereby shared meals are merely an opportunity for a couple of hours of uninterrupted screen time. So how can parents then justify telling their children to take a screen break?
Now researchers in the US such as Jason Nagata, a paediatrician at San Francisco’s University of California, are saying parents should “practice what they preach”.
The children of parents who use their handsets excessively were found to spend 40 minutes more on their phone than their peers.
Confiscating phones as a punishment was counter-productive but rationing screen time did work.
Meanwhile, 17 out of 20 state schools in the south London borough of Southwark are going smartphone-free following rising concerns about mental health, screen-time addiction, access to inappropriate content, theft, and harmful impact on sleep and attention spans. More than 13,000 pupils will be affected.
The campaign Smartphone Free Childhood now claims members in the US, United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Portugal, and Britain.
Today marks the 75th anniversary in what is recognised as one of the most influential books of modern literature.
Like all great stories, it delivered a stellar intro: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s final work — he was already dying from tuberculosis at the age of 46 when it was published — was initially more successful in the US than in the domestic market on which it was based. But it has always been in profitable print.
He conceived the idea in 1943 and established certain themes in an outline, “the system of organised lying on which society is founded, the ways in which this is done (falsification of records, etc), the nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of objective truth, leader-worship, etc...”
Orwell — real name Eric Blair — based himself on a remote corner of the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides following the death from a botched hysterectomy of Eileen, his wife, amanuensis, and inspiration, at the age of 39. He was a heavy smoker and proved immune to the drugs which were used to treat tuberculosis.
He never lived to benefit financially from his greatest work, but he has had a profound impact on our political consciousness and sense of history.
There are few people unfamiliar with the concepts he bequeathed to us and which have been translated into 65 languages in millions of books across the world.
His legacy includes a plethora of phrases with everyday application in 2024: Big Brother (is watching you); room 101; the two-minute hate; thoughtcrime; newspeak; doublethink.
The term coined from his name, 'Orwellian', has become synonymous with government repression and intrusion in the same way that ‘Kafkaesque’ is shorthand for bureaucratic control which is mind-bending in its illogicality.
Orwell believed that his manuscript was “unbelievably bad”.
His publisher thought it “amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read”.
The author’s gloomy, but self-effacing verdict can stand as inspiration for every aspiring writer who is full of self-doubt.
With an admirable perspicacity, Ireland’s Central Statistics Office, established in the same week that Orwell’s masterpiece was published, has released a snapshot of life in 1949 that poignantly recalls a past which, although it was in the last century, will remain vivid for many.
The CSO report captures huge societal and cultural shifts — in earnings, in car ownership, in rates of marriage — in a country where the population has risen from 2.96m to 5.15m.
Unlike Orwell’s grim dystopia, many facets of our country are still recognisable and welcome.
What hasn’t changed, however, is the ever increasing requirement to gather and measure data.
When the CSO was founded in Dublin Castle, it had a staff of 10, of which four were statisticians. Now the numbers approach 1,500 in offices in the capital and Cork, as well as regionally based interviewers.
In a world where misinformation is dangerous, we wish them more power to their collective elbows.
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