Capital Economy, Business and Finance
There are three ways of looking at the trial of Mike Lynch, the tech entrepreneur and former UK government advisor whose fraud trial began in San Francisco this week more than ten years after the US first sought his extradition: the prosecutor's way, the defence's and the historian's. The prosecution alleges "massive" fraud to overstate the value of Lynch's Autonomy software company before Hewlett Packard bought it for $10 billion in 2011. The defence has said jurors will see only smoke, not fire, and that everything alleged by prosecutors in opening statements was "normal business". Historians may be more interested in what preceded and followed Autonomy's acquisition: a run of other purchases by HP that failed to reverse its long decline from Silicon Valley powerhouse to also-ran; and a doomed battle by Lynch to avoid extradition to the US from the UK, where Autonomy was based.