Hewlett Packard is owed more than £700 million ($943 million) by the estate of late British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his former finance director after they lost a fraud case involving Lynch’s software company, a UK High Court judge ruled Tuesday.
The court’s decision comes nearly a year after Lynch was killed when his superyacht sank off Sicily, where he had gathered with friends and family to celebrate his acquittal months earlier in a separate US criminal trial.
The US tech company, now known as Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), had accused Lynch of fraud and conspiracy after it bought Lynch’s company, Autonomy Corp, for $11 billion.
HPE also took Lynch to court in the United Kingdom, seeking up to $4 billion in damages in a civil case. The High Court had ruled mostly in HPE’s favor in 2022, but the judge had said that the amount awarded would be “substantially less” than the company was seeking.
Judge Robert Hildyard was originally due to issue a draft ruling in September but delayed it after Lynch’s yacht, the Bayesian, sank in the storm off Sicily on August 19. Lynch and his daughter were among seven people who died while 15 others survived, including the captain and most of the crew.
