Finance

Mike Lynch, man once dubbed ‘Britain’s Bill Gates,’ dies at age 59

Published

2 months ago

August 22, 2024

Mike Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy. He was acquitted of fraud charges in June after defending himself in a trial over allegations that he artificially inflated Autonomy’s value in an $11.7 billion sale to tech giant Hewlett Packard.

Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images

LONDON — British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch has been found dead in the wreckage of his superyacht, which sank off the coast of Sicily earlier this week. He was 59 years old.

Just two months ago, Lynch won a stunning victory in a landmark U.S. trial over allegations from Hewlett Packard that he had artificially inflated the value of his company Autonomy when he sold it to the U.S. enterprise tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.

Fears for Lynch’s life swirled earlier this week when he was reported missing after the sinking of a yacht — later confirmed as owned by his wife Angela Bacares — off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in the province of Palermo in Italy.

Bacares was one of 15 people rescued rescued following the yacht’s collapse earlier this week.

The anchored vessel, a 56-meter (184 feet) sailing yacht named the Bayesian, was hit by a violent storm early Monday morning.

Witnesses told local media the anchored boat, which was carrying 10 crew members and 12 passengers, descended rapidly after its mast broke.

Lynch’s body was retrieved from the wreckage of the yacht Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC Thursday. His daughter, Hannah, remains unaccounted for, according to the source, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the situation. Sky News earlier reported the news.

‘Britain’s Bill Gates’

Born in Ilford, a large town in East London, to Irish parents in 1965, Lynch grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex. His mother was a nurse and his father was a fireman.

Lynch had a modest upbringing but, at the age of 11, he was awarded a scholarship to attend Bancroft’s School, a private school in Woodford Green, East London.

Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy, speaks at a Confederation of British Industry conference in London, U.K., in 2003.

Graham Barclay | Bloomberg | Getty Images

From Bancroft’s, he attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences, focusing on areas including electronics, mathematics and biology.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch completed a Ph.D. in signals processing and communications.

Toward the end of the 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd., a firm which produced designs and audio products for the music industry.

A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition business called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted the South Yorkshire Police among its customers.

But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he co-founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spinoff from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company scaled into one of Britain’s biggest tech firms.

Autonomy’s software, made up of pattern-matching algorithms, was touted as a solution that could help employees abstract meaning from unstructured data, including web pages, email, video, audio, and text.

These pattern recognition techniques were based on so-called Bayesian inference, a method of statistical inference named after a theorem developed by 18th century statistician Thomas Bayes.

Lynch’s luxury yacht, the Bayesian, was named after this mathematical model.

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch poses at the company’s then-offices near Cambridge, U.K, on Thursday, July 19, 2007.

Graham Barclay | Bloomberg | Getty Images

After the sale of his company to HP, Lynch became known by U.K. national media as “Britain’s Bill Gates,” serving as a rare example of a U.K. businessman who successfully built and scaled a globally significant tech business selling into various markets around the world.

Legal battle with HP

However, Lynch’s reputation would go on to take a hit after the deal with HP took a turn for the worse. In 2012, HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on the value of Autonomy — just a year after buying it.

Lynch soon became the target of a protracted legal battle with the U.S. tech giant, with HP suing Lynch for $5 billion in damages over accusations that Lynch had inflated Autonomy’s sales by about $700 million.

Lynch, who had long denied the allegations, was extradited from Britain to the U.S. in 2023 to stand trial over the HP allegations.

This came despite pressure on the U.K. government from Lynch’s supporters not to allow his extradition.

U.S. prosecutors had filed criminal charges including wire fraud and conspiracy for an alleged scheme to inflate Autonomy’s revenue starting in 2009, partly to entice a buyer.

However, in a stunning victory in June, Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges following trial. The trial lasted three months.

Mike Lynch leaves the Rolls Building in London following the civil case over his £8.4 billion sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. Picture date: Monday March 25, 2019.

Dominic Lipinski | PA Images | Getty Images

During the course of the trial, Lynch took the stand in his own defense. He denied wrongdoing and told jurors that HP botched Autonomy’s integration.

Prosecutors had alleged Lynch, along with Autonomy’s now-deceased finance executive Stephen Chamberlain, who also died in a tragic car crash Saturday, padded Autonomy’s finances in a number of ways.

These included back-dated agreements, concealing the firm’s loss-making business by reselling hardware, and intimidating or paying off individuals who had raised concerns.

However, Lynch told jurors he had focused on tech-related matters at Autonomy, not finances.

Accounting and money decisions were left to Autonomy’s then-chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, he said.

Hussain was separately convicted in the U.S. in 2018 on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud related to the HP deal. He was released from prison in January after serving a five-year sentence.

Lynch’s influence on UK tech

Alongside founding Autonomy, Lynch also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups. He founded Invoke in 2012.

He became a key voice supporting the U.K. technology industry, backing key names like cybersecurity firm Darktrace and legal tech firm Luminance.

Publicly listed Darktrace, which had fended off similar allegations of inflating its revenue by U.S. short seller Quintessential Capital Management, earlier this year agreed to a deal to be bought out and taken private by U.S. private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion in cash.

Lynch was previously on the board of U.K. broadcaster BBC, and once also served as an advisor to the U.K. government on the Council for Science and Technology.

In 2014 and 2015, he made the Forbes’ billionaires list, with an estimate net worth of $1 billion. However, while facing legal costs amid his dispute with HP, he dropped off that list in 2016.

Legal struggles aside, Lynch had several hobbies to keep him busy, including keeping and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.

Mike Lynch, founder of software firm Autonomy, at the company’s headquarters in, Cambridge, U.K., Aug. 24, 2000.

Bryn Colton | Hulton Archive | Getty Images

“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn in a 2016 interview. “I have cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has kept since the medieval times and none of them have any Apple products whatsoever.”

Prior to his passing, Lynch had reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk, a county in the east of England, to recover from his U.S. legal battle, the local East Anglian Times newspaper reported.

Just weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch told The Times newspaper of how he feared dying in prison if found guilty over the HP allegations.

“‘If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense,” Lynch said in the interview with The Times.

“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life – the question is, what do you want to do with it?” he added.

Finance

Biden administration forgives $4.5 million in student debt for 60,000 borrowers

Published

4 hours ago

October 18, 2024

Business Finance News

Borrowers who serve in the public service sector and government are eligible for this forgiveness. (iStock )

Another 60,000 student loan borrowers will receive student loan relief in the coming weeks. The Biden Administration announced $4.5 billion in relief for public service workers such as nurses, teachers and social workers.

The relief comes as a fix to the original Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. The program was initially signed into law by George W. Bush in 2007 to give non-profit and government employees loan forgiveness after 10 years in the workforce.

“Before President Biden and Vice President Harris entered the White House, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was so riddled by dysfunction that just 7,000 Americans ever qualified,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in the Education Department’s press release.

The new relief intends to pay down the loans of borrowers who were originally denied acceptance or who have still not received relief after making the 120 required monthly payments.

“Today’s announcement comes on top of the significant progress we’ve made for students and borrowers over the past three years,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.

“That includes approving debt cancelation for nearly 5 million Americans across all our various debt relief actions; providing the largest increases to the maximum Pell Grant award in over a decade; fixing Income-Driven Repayment so borrowers get the relief they earned; and holding colleges accountable for taking advantage of students and families,” Biden said.

If you have private student loans, federal relief doesn’t apply to you, unfortunately. If you’re looking to lower monthly payments and ease the burden of student loan debt, consider refinancing. See what your interest rate could be via the online marketplace Credible.

IS COLLEGE DEBT WORTH IT?

Resources available for students affected by the recent hurricanes

Hurricanes Helene and Milton have wreaked havoc on many communities in the south, causing serious physical damage and severely disrupting educational services. In response, the U.S. Department of Education released resources to help students and institutions of higher education recover.

“I have directed our team at the Department of Education to leverage every possible resource available to meet the needs of impacted students, families and school communities,” Cardona said.

The new resources include support for recovery needs like mental health care for students and educators, technical assistance and flexible financial aid policies at affected universities. Many students are also automatically being enrolled in natural disaster forbearance, so they don’t have to worry about their loans while recovering from the hurricanes.

Most of these resources will be concentrated on Georgia, which has seen a substantial amount of damage. The Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools Technical Assistance Center is a specific program Georgians have access to. It helps education agencies manage their safety, security and emergency management programs.

The Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center is another option that offers resources and links from organizations that help families and children, including those with disabilities, cope with disasters.

If you don’t have federal student loans that qualify for assistance, refinancing could cut your monthly payment. You can use Credible to compare student loan refinancing rates from multiple private lenders all at once without affecting your credit score.

STUDENT LOAN DEBT HAS INCREASED BY 430% SINCE 2003 – HERE’S HOW TO LOWER YOUR DEBT

$70 million in federal funding going to schools for additional mental health services

Along with aid to student loan borrowers and students affected by natural disasters, the Biden administration is also directing federal funding towards mental health services in K-12 schools. The administration announced a $70 million investment that will expand students’ access to mental health support.

“We know that students are more likely to access mental health support if it’s offered in schools, and our educators and school communities are on the front lines when a student is struggling,” Cardona said in the announcement.

“The need for mental health support in our schools remains high,” Cardona said. “Today’s announcement of an additional $70 million will allow more institutions and schools to train and hire mental health professionals – especially in underserved communities – ensuring that every student has access to the care they need to thrive.”

The new funding, combined with the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) investments, will go to 333 grantees across 48 states. It will help communities train and hire 4,000 more mental health professionals across the country.

To see what you’d pay on a private student loan, you can visit Credible today to view a rates table that allows you to compare fixed and variable rates from multiple lenders.

LESS THAN A THIRD OF AMERICANS APPROVE OF HOW BIDEN HAS HANDLED STUDENT LOAN DEBT

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