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Hewlett Packard Enterprise chief executive Antonio Neri has defended the “difficult” decision to pursue the tech company’s $4bn civil litigation against the estate of Mike Lynch, saying the move was “in the best interest of shareholders”.
Lynch and his daughter were among seven people who died when his family’s yacht sank off the coast of Sicily last month. They had been celebrating his acquittal on US fraud charges related to Hewlett-Packard’s $11.7bn purchase of Autonomy, the UK software group founded by the UK entrepreneur.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Neri said the acquittal and Lynch’s death had not altered the effort to pursue a separate civil claim over the acquisition.
“Obviously my job as a representative of shareholders is to make the difficult decisions,” Neri said, confirming he did not seek their input. “These are difficult decisions. But in the end, we are making decisions in the best interest of shareholders.”
He added that “obviously what we saw three weeks ago is a sad story. The loss of so many lives, including Dr Lynch. And obviously our thoughts are with them.
“But the reality of what happened does not change what happened in the past decade or so, where we believe wrongdoing was done, and therefore we have to see through the process with the UK judge completing his proceedings,” Neri said.
A spokesperson for the Lynch family declined to comment.
HPE was formed out of the 2015 split of Hewlett-Packard. The company sued Lynch after it suffered an $8.8bn writedown on its 2011 acquisition of Autonomy, accusing it of falsely inflating the company’s revenues.
In 2022, a UK High Court judge found Lynch liable for fraud after a lengthy trial. The following year, Lynch was extradited to the US to face criminal charges.
HPE has been waiting on the same judge to award damages against Lynch and Autonomy’s former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain, who was convicted of fraud in the US and sentenced to a five-year prison sentence in 2019.
Lynch is survived by his wife Angela Bacares and another daughter. Lynch’s estate is likely to be asked to cover HP’s millions of dollars in legal costs, and the company can also look to pursue his assets, including those passed on to his heirs.
“Remember that [the judge] already ruled that there was wrongdoing and it is now about what damages he will award after he completes his proceedings,” said Neri, who has led HPE since 2018. “So for us it is very normal to see it through.”
Once the judge rules on damages, “we will gather and understand what comes next”, he added.
Neri said the fact that Lynch and his co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain — who died as a result of a traffic collision in the UK days before Lynch’s yacht sank — had been acquitted in the US did not call the UK civil case into question.
“They are two different cases, independent cases,” Neri said. “A person [Hussain] was already convicted . . . and that basically confirms that wrongdoing was done.”
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