The British court has awarded damages of over £700 million to the American IT company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

This brings an end to the fraud case against British businessman Mike Lynch, who died in a shipwreck last summer.

The High Court in London had already ruled in favour of HPE, one of the two companies spun off from HP after a 2015 demerger, in early 2022 in the civil proceedings related to the sale of software company Autonomy. However, no ruling had yet been made on damages.

Considerably exaggerated
The awarded amount, however, is far below the $5 billion (approximately €4.3 billion) HP demanded. According to the French press agency AFP, which reviewed the ruling, the judge hearing the case found HP’s claims significantly exaggerated.

Lynch co-founded the big data company Autonomy. He and a former CFO, Sushovan Hussain, were suspected of using accounting tricks to inflate the British startup’s financials before its sale to HP. HP paid over $11 billion for it in 2011, but a year later wrote it down by $8.8 billion due to “serious irregularities.”

British Bill Gates
The businessman, also known as Britain’s Bill Gates, died along with several other passengers when the luxury yacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily. Lynch was traveling there to celebrate his acquittal in a separate criminal case in the United States for the same offenses.