A London judge ordered the estate of Mike Lynch, who was once heralded as the “British Bill Gates,” to pay $945 million to Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday. The ruling from British High Court Justice Robert Hildyard in the civil fraud case ends a decade-long legal saga that began when HP accused Lynch of inflating the value of his software company, Autonomy, during its $11 billion sale in 2011. In June 2024, Lynch was acquitted in San Francisco of criminal charges of fraud and conspiracy leading up to the HP deal. Two months later, he died when his yacht, the Bayesian, capsized off the coast of Sicily last August. The $40 million vessel sank in just 20 minutes in 80 mph winds, killing the tech mogul, his daughter, and five others. Now, his estate—estimated to be worth around $675 million—will be liable for the hefty settlement, with bankruptcy a possibility. Hewlett-Packard had originally requested $4.5 billion in damages, a sum Lynch derided as a “wild overstatement” before he died.
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