A High Court judge in London said he aimed to deliver a ruling soon on the latest challenge brought by Mike Lynch, the British technology tycoon fighting extradition to the United States. Mr Justice Swift heard argument on Tuesday, 18 January 2022, according to The Independent.
Lynch is challenging a decision made during his extradition proceedings. A judge at Westminster Magistrates’ Court had rejected “various challenges” he made to extradition and ruled that Home Secretary Priti Patel could decide whether to send him to the US.
The fight in the High Court is over timing. Patel then asked District Judge Michael Snow for until March 2022 to make her decision. Snow refused and said she should decide before Christmas. Lynch wants Swift to overturn that ruling by Snow. Lawyers for the US government argued that his challenge should be dismissed.
Patel wants to look at another ruling first, in a separate High Court case involving Lynch. That one, by Mr Justice Hildyard, was described to the court as imminent. Hildyard began overseeing a High Court trial in London more than two years earlier.
The Allegations
US authorities accuse Lynch of involvement in a multibillion-dollar fraud tied to the 2011 sale of his software company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard for 11 billion dollars (£8.5 billion). They say he deliberately overstated the value of a business that specialised in software for sorting through large data sets, and that the US firm suffered “colossal financial losses.”
Hewlett-Packard is pursuing a civil case in London as well. It sued Lynch and Autonomy’s former chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, for around five billion dollars (£3.8 billion). The company claimed Lynch “committed a deliberate fraud over a sustained period of time” to inflate Autonomy’s value. Just over a year after the acquisition it announced an 8.8 billion dollar (£6.7 billion) write-down of the firm’s worth.
Lynch has a different account. He argued that Hewlett-Packard was trying to make him “a scapegoat for their failures.”
