Mike Lynch’s estate faces being wiped out after $1.24bn ruling
High Court judge orders damages to be paid to Hewlett Packard Enterprise in one of Britain’s biggest fraud cases
Katie Prescott and Chris Dorrell
Tuesday March 24 2026, 7.00pm GMT, The TimesShareSave
Mike Lynch’s estate looks likely to have been wiped out after a High Court judge ordered it to pay $1.24 billion in damages and interest to Hewlett Packard Enterprise in one of Britain’s biggest fraud cases.
Last July, Mr Justice Hildyard awarded HPE £700 million in damages after finding that Lynch had misrepresented Autonomy’s finances when the company was bought by HPE in 2011.
The US tech company claimed it was owed interest too, since the acquisition had taken place 15 years earlier, and on Tuesday the judge ruled that the Lynch estate needed to pay an additional $236 million in interest alongside other costs.
Hildyard also refused the Lynch estate permission to appeal against the High Court’s ruling that Lynch was liable for damages to HPE, although the estate could still seek permission from the Court of Appeal to challenge the ruling.
The late entrepreneur drowned on his superyacht off the coast of Sicily in August 2024 along with his daughter Hannah and five others in an accident. They were on holiday, celebrating his unexpected acquittal in a US criminal trial for fraud. Lynch had also been sued by HPE in the UK.
Hildyard ruled in 2022 that Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, his chief financial officer and university friend, had defrauded HPE over the US tech giant’s $11.7 billion acquisition of his business software company Autonomy.
It was not a straightforward judgment. Hildyard found that HPE would still have bought Autonomy regardless of the state of its accounts, because of its innovative software.
Despite the substantial award to HPE on Tuesday, the judge criticised the company’s motives in pursuing the case.
“[HPE’s] undoubted success in demonstrating fraud, and their right to proper monetary vindication in respect of that fraud, should not obscure the extraordinary (and, to my mind, objectionable) purposes for which the claim was calibrated, publicised and pursued touting such an exaggerated quantum [sum] of loss, resulting in a very considerably extended litigation process”.
Hildyard described Lynch’s time in court as “a scorched-earth defence, fighting everything and conceding nothing in his own defence but also, in effect, in defence of his creation, IDOL [the name of Autonomy’s software] and Autonomy”.
HPE first accused Lynch of fraud in November 2012 and Lynch always denied the accusations. The company launched its claim in the High Court in 2015 and hearings in the London trial took place between 2019 and 2021. Hildyard’s judgment was handed down in 2022, when Lynch’s extradition to the US was approved.
It is estimated that the Lynch estate is worth £500 million. One person close to the situation described HP trying to get more than $1 billion from an estate worth half as much as “two bald men fighting over a comb”.
However, many of the family assets are in the name of Angela Bacares, Lynch’s widow, including Loudham Hall, their Suffolk estate, and shares in Darktrace, the cybersecurity business Lynch backed. Darktrace was sold in 2024 for over $5 billion, which valued the stake at more than $300 million. If HP can prove these assets were really his, they could be targeted.
A Lynch family spokesperson said: “We are disappointed by the court’s refusal and believe an application to the Court of Appeal should follow in the interests of justice.
“Dr Lynch’s acquittal in the US, where witnesses were properly cross-examined, exposed the truth. The damage to Autonomy was the result of HP’s own actions and failures, not wrongdoing at Autonomy.”
A spokesman for Hewlett Packard Enterprise said: “HPE is pleased with the court’s ruling and its rejection of the estate’s request for permission to appeal, which brings us another step closer to resolution of the dispute.”
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