US tech giant Hewlett Packard Co on Friday won a multibillion dollar fraud case over its 2011 purchase of British software company Autonomy Corp PLC.
One year after the deal, HP accused Autonomy of falsifying its accounts, claiming it had inflated its value and caused huge losses for the US company when the correct accounting emerged after the US$11.1 billion sale.
HP sued two executives — Mike Lynch, Autonomy’s British founder, and former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain — for about US$5 billion dollars.
Photo: Reuters
A US court in 2018 convicted Hussain of fraud relating to the sale and jailed him for five years.
In a summary of his decision in what is believed to be Britain’s biggest-ever civil fraud trial, judge Robert Hildyard said HP and other claimants had “substantially won.”
Hildyard said the damages to be paid are to be determined at a later date.
HP claimed that the two men had “artificially inflated Autonomy’s reported revenues, revenue growth and gross margins ... over a sustained period of time.”
The company announced a US$8.8 billion write-down of the firm’s value just more than a year after the sale.
British Home Secretary Priti Patel on Friday signed an order for the extradition of Lynch to the US, where he faces separate criminal proceedings over the sale, Patel’s office said in a statement.
Lynch has the right to apply to the British High Court to appeal the extradition order, it added.
Lynch has denied any wrongdoing.
A lawyer for the businessman, Kelwin Nicholls, said the court’s ruling was “disappointing,” adding that Lynch “intends to appeal.”
Another of Lynch’s lawyers, Chris Morvillo, said his client “firmly denies the charges brought against him in the US and will continue to fight to establish his innocence.”
Lynch is “a British citizen who ran a British company in Britain, subject to British laws and rules, and that is where the matter should be resolved,” Morvillo said.
Lynch, from Suffolk in eastern England, said that HP was making him “a scapegoat for their failures.”
HP lawyer Laurence Rabinowitz told the court that Autonomy used “a variety” of fraudulent devices to boost or invent revenue.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) yesterday said it plans to resume operations at two coal-fired power generators for three months to boost security of electricity supply as liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply risks are running high due to the Middle East conflict. The two coal-fired power generators are at Mailiao Power Plant in Yunlin County’s Mailiao Township (麥寮). The plant, operated by Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), supplied electricity to Taipower’s power grid until the end of last year. Taipower’s decision came about one month after Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) on March 10 said that the nation had no imminent
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
RSS