Judge snubs FBI's bid to snaffle Autonomy docs ahead of founder Mike Lynch's UK showdown A British judge has rejected the FBI's request for legal documents submitted to London's High Court by Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's lawyers just weeks before his civil lawsuit is heard in Britain. US prosecutors sought evidence and witness statements filed in England by Lynch and CFO Sushovan Hussain. Last April Hussain was …
Evidence submitted to a court is never, ever public during the case as that would be prejudicial.
Most of it is then sealed at the end of the case, as it always contains a lot of private, personal and commercially sensitive information.
So no, it isn't public and probably never will be.
He exaggerated the value of his company, okay that's bad, but where was HP's due diligence ? What band of incompetent interns audited Autonomy and contented themselves with rubber-stamping the whole thing ?
If I buy a house without checking it out, I don't think I can sue the previous owner if all the nice pictures I saw were just wallpaper and cleverly painted plywood. Why should a multi-billion dollar company get that privilege ?
I've said this many times over the last few years and if you follow the various stories on here and elsewhere, it gets even more embarrassing for HP.
El Reg ran a recent story telling how the then FCO was trying to convince the CEO that this was neither a good fit for them nor a good price to pay but was sidelined.
Ultimately, it all smacks far more of HP trying to save face over what was a catastrophic purchase rather than proving there was any actual illegal activity going on.
HP rushed in, failed their due diligence, failed to listen to very senior staff warnings and got their fingers burned. Tough shit, springs to mind.
Caveat emptor and all that.
I missed any Reg stuff, was just checking in on the financial organs. Well, initially, anyway.
But if you've ever worked at that level in that field, every single damn statement of Lynch is a great big screaming red flag with black flags smashing you in the face. Re fraud, deceptive accounting, and being nothing more than a noise-making salesman riding a brief wave of socially-created opportunity despite being clueless of market, tech'y, or ethics.
But HP is full of precisely the same sort of parasites. And I've seen this internal-corporate senior-hysteria over and over and over, so, no, not real surprised at HP. HP was utterly swamped by hysterical parasites 20yrs ago, no real change now, and Lynch is a parasite's parasite.
The final giveaway was him coming out ranting and swinging and posturing, and demanding evidence etc, and denying etc. , coupla years back when the accusations first started flying. But never actually addressed the concerns, merely conducted public attacks re them. Kinda an abstracted ad hominem. And I looked at that (seen it before), looked at the dates -- yee-up, he's still inside the sale's vesting period.
And boy, didn't he go very suddenly very quiet once the contract's vesting vested. Job done, you see.
Evidence previously reported on El Reg tells us at least two existing-or-former HP directors were among those to say the deal was mad and vastly overpriced.
As did others, like Oracle.
I think I said at the time, this looks like an ill-judged MeToo from HP, trying to play with IBM and Oracle (who had recently acquired hardware capability in the form of Sun) in high-end enterprise stuff.
Caveat Emptor has its place in this argument regardless of Autonomy's conduct.
Even if Autonomy were dishonest, HP have a track record of corporate malfeasance (bribery, for one), which while it doesn't excuse any bad conduct on Autonomy's part, it does give some needed perspective.
Also, they're both businesses, their task is to make money and not be caught doing something illegal.
I have no sympathy for either of them (the companies), only for their victims, it's their lowest paid employees and their customers who pay the price for both companies' greed.
It never fails to amaze me that people confuse incompetence with criminal activity:
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.305114/gov.uscourts.cand.305114.419.0.pdf
"Sometime in late 2008, Hussain and his co-conspirators set out to improperly inflate Autonomy’s revenue figures to influence market analysts’ projections about its growth and estimates of its market value, in the hopes of an eventual acquisition and a big payday. (Hussain netted $16 million from the HP acquisition.) In Hussain, the conspiracy also included CEO Mike Lynch, as well as Christopher “Stouffer” Egan, Peter Menell, Andy Kanter, and Steve Chamberlain, all executives at Autonom
and which piece of the evidence do you think didn't prove a crime (and if you work for Dark Trace then take care to hide your IP :-)?
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.305114/gov.uscourts.cand.305114.419.0.pdf
If YOU as a company are willing to lie to make more money, OTHER companies are too. Just as with outsourcing, every company out there thinks that only THEY have discovered the secret of making more money by telling porkies. As far as I'm concerned, HP got what they deserved.
It takes 6 months to a year to complete a purchase at this level, and that's AFTER the time spent investigating the potential purchase before even tendering an offer, so they had plenty of time to figure out if the company was worth the asking price. Obviously they thought they did well when they bought it or they never would have signed the contract, so if they made hash of the deal afterwards or didn't find problems before, it's on HP. The judge did the right thing here.
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