Mike Lynch estate ordered to pay HP about £930m over Autonomy deal

Court ruling

The estate of the late tech tycoon Mike Lynch must pay Hewlett-Packard an estimated $1.24bn (£930m) in damages and interest over the acquisition of his Cambridge-based software company, Autonomy, a High Court judge has ruled.

Mr Justice Hildyard said Hewlett-Packard was owed damages and interest in relation to its £8.2bn purchase of Autonomy in 2011. He also refused Lynch's estate permission to appeal Tuesday's ruling or earlier judgments in the case.

A spokesperson for the Lynch family said they were disappointed by the decision and believed an application to the Court of Appeal should follow "in the interests of justice".

Long-running dispute

HP sued Lynch for about $5bn following its $11.1bn (£8.2bn) takeover of Autonomy in 2011. At a nine-month trial in 2019, believed at the time to be the UK's biggest civil fraud trial, the company alleged that Lynch had inflated Autonomy's revenues and had committed a deliberate fraud over a sustained period.

In 2022, Hildyard said the American firm had "substantially succeeded" in its claim, though he said it was likely to receive substantially less than it had sought in damages. He found that Autonomy had not accurately portrayed its financial position during the sale, but said HP would still have bought the company, albeit at a lower price.

The estate had sought to challenge that 2022 decision, and also sought permission to appeal a July ruling that found Hewlett-Packard Enterprise had suffered losses of around £700m through the Autonomy purchase.

Arguments and background

In written submissions for a hearing in November 2025, Patrick Goodall KC, for HPE, said Lynch had "not only perpetrated an enormous fraud, but lied about it at every stage", and that an appeal aimed at avoiding the consequences should not be allowed. Richard Hill, representing Lynch's estate, argued that the $761m in interest sought by the claimants was excessive and based on a flawed analysis.

The Lynch family said HP's original $5bn damages claim had already been shown to be vastly exaggerated. In a statement, they said the judgment described parts of that claim as "without foundation" and criticised the way it had been pursued. They also said Lynch's acquittal in the US had "exposed the truth" and argued that damage to Autonomy resulted from HP's own actions and failures, not wrongdoing at Autonomy.

Lynch, a University of Cambridge graduate, co-founded Autonomy in 1996 from a specialist software research group called Cambridge Neurodynamics. He built it into one of the UK's biggest companies, and its sale was at the time the largest takeover of a British technology business.

Lynch was extradited to the US in 2023 to face criminal charges and was cleared of fraud in 2024, just weeks before his death. He and his daughter were among seven people who died when the yacht Bayesian capsized off Sicily in storms in August 2024.