Mike Lynch and Christopher Morvillo spent 12 years together fighting a legal battle over two continents. Their victory celebration ended in tragedy.
For Mike Lynch, June 6 was a day more than a decade in the making.
Standing in a courtroom in San Francisco, the British software mogul had just been found not guilty of defrauding Hewlett-Packard in the sale of his software company, Autonomy. It was a case that, for more than a year, had kept him shuffling around a townhouse wearing an ankle bracelet in a city 5300 miles from home.
Nearby, Christopher J. Morvillo, the veteran corporate lawyer who helped lead Lynch’s legal team, also felt a wave of relief.
The two men had been joined at the hip for years to rebut HP’s accusations in the United States and Britain. One legal expert compared the proceedings in San Francisco to Enron’s in complexity, given the thousands of documents and accounting manoeuvres at issue. An acquittal had seemed unlikely a year ago.
After leaving the courtroom, Lynch cut off his ankle bracelet. Morvillo turned to LinkedIn, writing his first post to thank his colleagues and express his relief.
“And they all lived happily ever after. …” he wrote.
That happy ending didn’t last long.
Less than three months later, Lynch and Morvillo, both 59, died aboard Lynch’s family yacht, the Bayesian, when it foundered off the coast of Sicily. Five others died as well: Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah; Morvillo’s wife, Neda; Jonathan Bloomer, a prominent British insurance executive; Bloomer’s wife, Judy; and Recaldo Thomas, the ship’s cook.
And in a bizarre coincidence, Stephen Chamberlain, a financial executive at Autonomy who was Lynch’s co-defendant in San Francisco, was fatally struck in a hit-and-run in Britain days before.
Why the ship sank remains under investigation by Italian and British authorities. Numerous interviews with friends and associates, as well as public records, revealed what the men went through during their 12-year legal fight, and what they had planned after it ended.
Adviser to the Prime Minister
Until recently, most Americans would probably not have recognised Lynch as a tech mogul. But in Britain, he had once been seen as a homegrown Bill Gates.
In 1996, Lynch founded Autonomy, a software company that analysed messy reams of data like emails and online video for patterns that could help clients unearth hidden insights. By 2011, Autonomy had become one of Britain’s biggest international tech companies, establishing its base in Cambridge, England, as a startup hub.
That raised Lynch’s profile as well, earning him royal honours; an adviser role to the Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron; and a seat on the board of the BBC.
His success was cemented when he sold Autonomy to HP for US$11.1 billion ($18.8b) in 2011, earning him hundreds of millions. But amid a revolt by HP shareholders and analysts about the size and wisdom of the deal, the tech giant took a US$8.8b write-down the next year, a move that led some to declare the deal among the worst in corporate history, and accused Lynch of illegally hiding the true shape of Autonomy by inflating its sales.
It was then that Morvillo took notice of Autonomy’s problems.
The conflict seemed like an opportunity for the white-collar defence lawyer in the New York office of Clifford Chance, a huge international firm. Morvillo sent a note to a partner in Britain just before Thanksgiving in 2012. Was there an opening to represent either HP or Autonomy?
Fifteen minutes later, his colleague wrote back: When could he fly to London?
Morvillo flew over a few days later for what he thought was going to be a week’s work. He ended up spending years commuting between New York and London.
“It’s covered one-third of my career,” Morvillo said on the legal podcast For the Defense With David Oscar Markus, in an episode that was published a week before the Bayesian sank. “It has been a constant presence in my life for the last 12 years.”
Lynch and Morvillo were a study in contrasts. The executive was cool but intense, known for a hard-charging leadership style that federal prosecutors later tried to make hay of. The lawyer was known for being a calm presence, largely eschewing over-the-top displays.
“He had a judgment and a steadiness that you need when you’re in a 12-year marathon,” Gary Lincenberg, who represented Chamberlain, said of Morvillo.
As the scope of HP’s allegations – that Autonomy executives had manipulated earnings, overstating revenue by backdating contracts and disguising low-margin hardware sales as higher-margin software ones – took shape, Lynch, Morvillo and an army of lawyers assembled a defence: Lynch had done nothing wrong, and HP was to blame for Autonomy’s woes.
A mathematician by training, Lynch often asked his legal team what the odds were for success. The next several years provided a disheartening picture.
In 2016, American prosecutors accused Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy’s chief financial officer, of fraud. Lynch and Chamberlain were hit with similar charges in 2018. The former Autonomy chief also faced civil fraud claims in London by a successor company to HP.
Hussain was convicted and sentenced to nearly six years in prison. The judge overseeing Lynch’s British trial found him liable.
The same day that Lynch lost his civil battle, the British Government approved his extradition to the United States to stand trial on criminal charges.
Morvillo kept on the move, jetting to San Francisco to observe the Hussain trial and to London for Lynch’s civil trial. By one colleague’s estimate, he had made up to 100 flights over the years.
Once Lynch arrived in San Francisco in May 2023, he faced another surprise. The presiding judge ordered that he be placed under house arrest as a potential flight risk, as well as round-the-clock security on his dime. (The entrepreneur later jokingly referred to the guards as his roommates.)
But Lynch stayed busy. His mornings were spent checking on his venture capital firm and on researchers in Cambridge, whose work on artificial intelligence and hearing loss he was funding. Then he turned to his legal defence, peppering Morvillo with questions.
For Morvillo, that meant a move to San Francisco, where he called a downtown hotel home for four months, away from his wife, Neda, and two grown children.
“Neda and Chris lived their lives as devoted, loving parents who always put their daughters and families first,” the Morvillo family said in a statement. “Their passing is a tremendous loss for our family and for the countless people who knew and loved them both.”
The defence takes a risk
Heading into court, his legal team worried that Lynch would probably serve life in prison.
The trial was long and dry, with 42 witnesses who were asked about what could sometimes be thousands of pages of documents. Jurors fell asleep. Every Thursday night, the Lynch legal team regrouped at dinner, over bottles of Sea Smoke Cellars pinot wine, Morvillo’s preference.
Lynch and his lawyers increasingly believed that jurors might find him hard-driving – but in a way similar to that of other visionary tech giants, like Elon Musk or Gates.
The team decided to take a risk: Lynch would take the stand as the last witness. Questioning him for the defence was Morvillo, who by now had a feel for how to direct his client in testimony. They spoke affably in front of the jury, comparing the discovery of Autonomy’s troubles to taking a microscope to a spotless kitchen.
“I think his testimony was pivotal at the end of the day and probably is what won the day for us,” Morvillo told the For the Record podcast.
Waiting for the verdict was excruciating. In the courtroom June 6, Lynch kissed his wife, Angela Bacares, on the forehead before sitting down next to his lawyers. Morvillo told him to take things one day at a time.
Minutes later, the jury began to deliver the first of 15 “not guilty” verdicts.
That night, Lynch hosted a party for his legal team and his co-defendant, Chamberlain, at the Third Floor restaurant at the Jay Hotel in downtown San Francisco. In an emotional toast, Morvillo said that working the trial had been one of the legal team’s life missions.
In his LinkedIn post, Morvillo thanked his wife and daughters for their support, adding, “I am so glad to be home”.
Lynch flew back to Britain with big dreams. He wanted to refocus on investing and helping Britain’s technology industry.
Another priority was figuring out how to revamp an extradition treaty that he believed had unfairly sent him to the United States in chains. The day of his acquittal, he texted David Davis, a British lawmaker who had protested the extradition.
“We’ve got to deal with this treaty’ were his first words to me,” Davis said in an interview.
Back home – over what Davis described as a “moderately alcoholic lunch” at Wiltons, a high-end restaurant in West London – the two men discussed Lynch’s increased compassion for the wrongfully convicted, spurred by his own legal battles.
Lynch still had other legal business. He was waiting to hear how much he had to pay in damages in the British civil fraud case brought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a successor to HP, which said he owed up to US$4b. (Hewlett Packard Enterprise said last month that it was still pursuing damages against Lynch’s estate.)
But first and foremost, Lynch wanted to do … nothing.
He returned to Loudham Hall, his sprawling 16th-century estate in Suffolk, England, where he raised Red Poll cattle and other livestock, and held a garden party for friends to celebrate.
A final voyage
And then there was the Bayesian, the 184-foot superyacht that his family owned. Lynch had looked forward to cruising on the vessel – named after a theorem for statistical analysis – as a way to unplug and celebrate. Within weeks of acquittal, he asked his legal team to accompany him for several planned voyages.
Morvillo and his wife joined Lynch on the yacht in Italy, with plans to fly to Greece afterward to meet their daughters, the Morvillo family said in a statement.
Afterward, the statement added, Morvillo intended to continue working “because he recognised that he had reached a new level in his career and knew, deservedly so, he would be highly sought after”.
During the voyage, the yacht sliced through the waters off the Italian coastline, from Amalfi to the Eolian Sea, before ending up off Sicily. By August 17, the trip was near its end: Lynch was preparing to return to London, where he was set to have a second lunch with Davis.
But bad news broke August 18: Chamberlain had been fatally hit by a car back home in Britain. Devastated, Morvillo messaged the Lynch team, telling one colleague to kiss his wife and children.
The next day, the Bayesian sank, and both Lynch and Morvillo were dead.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael J. de la Merced
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
