Less than half of 1 percent of federal criminal cases end in an acquittal, so billionaire Mike Lynch and his co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain, seemed to be the luckiest of unlucky men on June 6 this year, when they were found not guilty of fraud charges that could have landed them in prison for 25 years.
But two months after that ebullient moment on the 17th floor of the federal courthouse in San Francisco, their fortunes took a tragic turn.
On Saturday, Chamberlain suffered fatal injuries when he was struck by a car while out for a run near his home in Cambridgeshire, England.
ADVERTISEMENT
And then, on Monday, Lynch was among the six declared missing after a tornado-like waterspout sank the 184-foot sailing yacht Bayesian, as it was anchored a half-mile off the coast of Sicily. Lynch’s younger daughter, 18-year-old Hannah, who had recently earned a place at Oxford, was also missing. So was one of the defense attorneys in the case, former federal prosecutor Christopher Morvillo, and his wife.
The bodies of all those missing were recovered following a search by divers that lasted several days. Hannah’s body was brought ashore last, on Friday.
“In the course of 48 hours, I can’t process what has happened, but both of our clients, as well as Chris and his wife, are gone,” law partner Gary Lincenberg told Business Insider.
A paper trail indicates that the ill-fated yacht was owned by Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares. It is named after the Bayesian inference, an approach to probability that was both the focus of Lynch’s PhD thesis and the underpinning of the software that made him Britain’s first tech billionaire.
The fact that Lynch ever got a doctorate from Cambridge was an improbability in itself. Lynch was the son of Irish immigrants; his mother was an intensive care nurse from County Tipperary, his father a firefighter from County Cork. They advised Lynch not to enter a profession that involved charging into burning buildings. Lynch was bright enough to secure scholarships at an exclusive private school and then a university. His genius was not so much in engineering itself, but in applying it.
He studied machine learning before it was fashionable, and co-founded a series of start-ups. One was Autonomy, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11.7 billion after a secret meeting with its top executives in 2011. Hewlett-Packard’s then-CEO, Léo Apotheker, had hoped to turn it from a faltering computer hardware clunker into a high-profit software giant. He ended up taking the combined companies towards an $8 billion loss.
The new CEO, Meg Whitman, alleged that Lynch and others at Autonomy had cooked the books before the sale to make it look more profitable than it was. Hewlett-Packard sued Lynch in England in a civil fraud case in 2019, and he spent 20 days testifying. Then, in early 2022, Justice Robert Hildyard issued a 1,700-page decision finding that Lynch and Autonomy had committed fraud. The Crown sought $4 billion in damages that are still pending.
At the same time, federal authorities in the U.S. sought to extradite Lynch on criminal charges. Lynch fought it for two years before he arrived in San Francisco in chains in May of 2023. He was released on $100 million bail and consigned to house arrest in a rental home with cameras installed in every room, and two armed guards on duty around the clock.
The judge in San Francisco was Charles Breyer, brother of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Charles had also overseen the trial of Lynch’s right-hand man, Autonomy Chief Financial Officer Sushovan Hussain, on fraud charges, in the same courtroom some months before. Hussain had been convicted. Lynch and Chamberlain seemed all but sure to suffer the same fate as their trial commenced in March of 2024.
British entrepreneur Mike Lynch leaves the High Court in London, Britain March 25, 2019.
Henry Nicholls/ReutersThe prosecution plodded through seemingly endless exhibits culled from 15 million financial documents and emails obtained for the case. One juror repeatedly dozed off.
“I know it’s not fascinating, but you’ve got to tell me whether you can stay awake for eight more weeks during this testimony,” Breyer said, according to The Times.
“That’s a negative,” the juror replied. “I can’t.”
The juror was replaced and the case crept on, until Lynch took the stand on his own behalf. He testified that his first job had been cleaning floors in the hospital where his mother works.
“I’m still a demon mopper,” he testified.
He also described being Irish in England during the conflict with the IRA.
“You had to learn to run fast,” he said.
When it came to the decision to sell Autonomy, he said Hewlett-Packard was so anxious to make the deal that it had offered double the usual takeover price margin.
“The normal premium on the London market was about 30 percent,” he said. “HP was offering 60 percent. That would be like trying to stop a herd of elephants in terms of shareholders agreeing to it.”
His attorney, Chris Morvillo, asked what the trial had been like for him.
“It’s surreal,” Lynch testified. “I’ve heard comments from people that just don’t paint the picture of the company that I and my colleagues and friends worked at for 15 years.”
Lynch added, “I’ve sat and watched a parade of witnesses that I’ve never met and some that I may have just shaken their hand, and I’ve heard about a series of transactions I have no involvement in.”
At the end of the 11-week trial, the jury acquitted Lynch and Chamberlain of all charges. Morvillo joined in their tearful exultation at being among the lucky very few.
Chamberlain’s luck ran out Saturday with a fatal encounter with a car. Lynch and Morvillo were on the Bayesian at 4:30 a.m. on Monday when the freak storm suddenly struck. An emergency flare went up into the darkness, but the boat had sunk by the time help arrived.
Fifteen of the passengers and crew were rescued, including Lynch’s wife. There was also a 1-year-old child, Sophia, and her mother, Charlotte Golunski, a partner at another Lynch venture, Invoke Capital. The mother recounted her ordeal to the Italian press, saying she had been on deck when the raging storm tore her child from her arms.
“For two seconds I lost my baby in the sea,” the mother told Giornale di Sicilia. “Then I immediately hugged her again amid the fury of the waves.”
She summoned the fury of a mother.
“I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning. It was all dark. In the water, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I screamed for help, but all I could hear around me was the screams of the others.”
A man in an inflatable lifeboat pulled her and Sophia to safety. They were joined by the child’s father. They were all lucky to be alive.
Mike Lynch’s remarkable luck, meanwhile, had sadly run out.
