Mike Lynch, the recently exonerated British tech billionaire and Autonomy founder, has restated his opposition to a controversal extradition treaty between the UK and US.
“It has to be wrong that a US prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England than the UK police do,” Lynch said in the weekend interview with The Times.
Since the events of 9/11, US prosecutors do not need to provide prima facie evidence of wrongdoing when demanding the extradition of a suspect from UK soil.
The same rules do not apply in reverse - UK prosecutors must establish probable cause when demanding an extradition from the US.
Lynch’s latest comments we made in his first interview with a major media publication since his victory in the US courts in June.
Lynch was facing the rest of his life in jail due to allegations of fraud related to the $11 billion sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.
HP, which wrote down Autonomy’ value by $8.8 billion a year after the purchase, accused Lynch of artificially inflating the firm’s value.
He was extradited to the US in 2023 to face prosecution in a trial that few thought he stood a chance of winning.
Autonomy’s chief financial officer was convicted of fraud in 2018, but a San Francisco jury found Lynch not guilty of all counts levelled against him, allowing him to return to his native Britain.
Lynch immediately began his crusade against what he sees as an unfair extradition arrangement between the UK and the US.
He quickly won the support of Conservative MP for Goole and Pocklington, David Davis, an outspoken critic of the US’s treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Lynch’s treatment “highlights a massively dysfunctional arrangement we have with this extradition treaty”, Davis said following Lynch’s acquittal. “I’ve always been pretty clear, in my mind, that this was a bogus case.”
Lynch still faces civil charges in the UK, as HP is seeking $4 billion in damages. He struck a sanguine tone about these charges in the Times interview.
“My wife has been very good at investing in the things that I’ve told her to from a point of view of technology. We’ve done very well… It’s not a perilous situation,” he said.