LONDON – A British tech entrepreneur appeared in a London court Tuesday to fight extradition to the United States on fraud charges stemming from his firm’s takeover by Hewlett-Packard a decade ago.
U.S. prosecutors say Michael Lynch inflated the value of his software company, Autonomy, before it was bought by Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011.
HP wrote off most of the Autonomy purchase price the following year, and the debacle triggered a boardroom shakeup at the American tech company. “This was an English company, cooking its books in England, making it appear what it wasn’t, and then persuading an American company to grossly overpay for it, based on those cooked books,” Mark Summers, a lawyer representing the U.S.