Judge details Lynch's $700k signoff via iPhone text in full Autonomy judgement When an accounts assistant asked Autonomy founder Mike Lynch to approve a $700,000 purchase order in December 2010, the British exec "wrote 'ok' from his iPhone." "He asked no questions at all," wrote the High Court judge who found Lynch liable for fraud in the case brought against him by HPE. The detail was included in Mr …
It's worth remembering that HP wildly overpaid for Autonomy even if revenues had been what Lynch and co. claimed, bidding billions more than anybody else was willing to offer. (IIRC Oracle laughed them out of the room.) So HP itself is responsible for about half of its losses here.
I wonder if the execs who got paid huge bonuses for executing this masterstroke of strategy will have to give that money back?
Yet ""I consider that HP bought a smaller and less successful company than it was represented to be and that HP was led to and did believe that it was acquiring,"
Companies can pay a premium price for acquisitions of companies that have a potential for growing - but Autonomy growth was on paper, and HP acted like a bunch of idiots - with the help of Deloitte. Still damaging an idiot doesn't make a crime a lesser crime (in some situation it makes it even a worse one..., not this one though).
Execs like Apotheker were shown the door - still they could open their golden parachute... because canis canem non est - HP even gave him a bonus to "repay" him from not being probably able to land another CEO job... that is how it works in the rarefied heights of those companies....
So Ray Lane, Meg Whitman, even the CFO, all knew it was a shit deal. Leo didn't even read Deloitte's due diligence report. And not one of them had the guts or the principles to stand up for the shareholders or the employees, particularly ones like me with stock options. These are the individuals who should be criminally culpable for HP's losses.
Looks like Mike's Extradition is almost a done deal. I'm not sure why HP is getting so much grief in these comments vs. Mike Lynch and his team, who knew exactly what they were doing when they cooked the books to make the numbers at the end of the quarter. Sure, HP overpaid, but that isn't a crime. Unlike fraud.
The same people who brought you this fraud also brought you Darktrace #justsaying
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