UPDATED 01:35 EDT / OCTOBER 02 2015

NEWS

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch files $160m counter-lawsuit against HP

Mike Lynch, the founder and CEO of Autonomy Corporation PLC, now known as HP Autonomy, has launched a legal challenge against Hewlett-Packard Co. seeking $150 million in damages over allegations that he somehow concocted Autonomy’s accounts to inflate the firm’s value.

HP famously paid a whopping $10.7 billion to acquire Autonomy in the summer of 2011, but just over a year later SiliconANGLE was the first to report the tech giant had wrote down its value by $8.8 billion, accusing Lynch of accounting irregularities and misrepresenting his organization’s value.

HP began legal proceedings against Lynch several years ago, but the Autonomy founder has consistently and repeatedly denied the allegations.

“Over the past three years, HP has made many statements that were highly damaging to me and misleading to the stock market,” Lynch said in a statement to U.K media this week. “Worse, HP knows, or should have known, these statements were false. We are finally starting to see what really happened with Autonomy. HP’s own documents, which the court will see, make clear that HP was simply incompetent in its operation of Autonomy, and the acquisition was doomed from the very beginning.”

Lynch’s action comes after HP filed lawsuits against him in both the U.K. and the U.S., arguing that contrary to what Autonomy’s accounts suggested, the company was losing market share and was shrinking rather than growing.

Across the Atlantic, the long and drawn out legal proceedings finally came to an end in January of this year, when the U.K.’s Serious Fraud office announced there was insufficient evidence to secure a conviction against Lynch. However, HP’s legal action in the U.S. remains ongoing.

But Lynch argues that HP was in “chaos” at the time it acquired Autonomy, with speculation mounting over its then-CEO Leo Apotheker, and an alleged attempt to abort the acquisition. “[HP’s management] generally fought amongst themselves like cats in a sack, causing Autonomy to disintegrate,” Lynch claimed.

Lynch further stated that neither he nor anyone else misled HP over Autonomy, and that the deal was just one of several that HP mishandled over the years. Lynch added that all of HP’s $1 billion-plus deals in the last decade have “failed”.

“Meg Whitman [HP’s current CEO] can explain all this to a judge when we finish this in court once and for all,” Lynch said by way of a promise.

But HP told reporters that it too, was looking forward to its day in court. “Mike Lynch’s lawsuit is a laughable and desperate attempt to divert attention from the $5 billion lawsuit HP has filed and the ongoing criminal investigation,” a company spokesperson said. “HP anxiously looks forward to the day Lynch and Hussain will be forced to answer for their actions in court.”

Image credit: AJEL via pixabay.com

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