Autonomy founder Mike Lynch can be extradited to US
bbc.com
bbc.com
A US person can be federally charged for violating a foreign law while overseas. The example used when I read of this was a guy convicted for wrapping lobsters for shipment in Nicaragua in wax paper instead of a bag (or something along those lines).
It was very strange because the violation in Nicaragua was a misdemeanor, but the US law for committing a crime is a felony.
But it is limited to trade of plants and animals, not meant as a general extradition agreement or to import _all_ foreign laws.
https://humanevents.com/2014/05/30/the-true-villains-behind-...
Wow--
(I do get we should not be importing endangered s pieces of wood. This seems like someone overreacted? I guess the moral of the story is don't play around with the feds?)
Exotic wood is in many ways like conflict diamonds. It funds some quite horrible people who will denude a country of its exotic wood if allowed--we have seen this in action already.
Enforcement is far easier on the US side than on the origin side--which is normally some corrupt as hell dictatorship with people who are brutally poor.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson#FWS_raids_&_Lacey_Act_v...
Both Martin and Taylor ran far, far away from this scheme.
Gibson absolutely deserved the whacking they got.
You can get around these problems in a legal way and be somewhat responsible. Taylor, famously, bought all the ebony stands in the world and promised to buy all ebony at the same price because the local population were cutting down rare ebony trees and leaving them to rot if they didn't have black heartwood. This, of course, creates a monopoly which is its own problem ... however, any solution you come up with has to take into account that the locals will destroy the extremely rare ebony trees for absurdly small (to us) amounts of money.
You can work within the legal frameworks, and Gibson has more than enough staff to be able to comply. Gibson isn't some tiny company that unjustly trod by the government. Had you or I done this, we would be rotting in jail. Gibson merely got a fine and even got its wood back.
The CEO of Gibson knew that he was illegally importing wood, and did it anyway. His comparatively tiny donations to the GOP were irrelevant.
I think OP said: An UK citizen can be extradicted from the UK to the US just by having done a thing that it is illegal in the US but not in the UK.
You said: An US citizen can be charged in the US if he committed a crime abroad even if that thing is not typified as illegal in the US.
Wake me up when an US citizen is extradicted to the UK because he did something perfectly legal in Washington but which is considered a crime in London.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/100739/response/25520...
https://fas.org/irp/world/uk/extradite.pdf
The story itself is about a person who committed a crime that is a crime in both locations so...
If it were the case, I suppose tens of millions of US people could be extradited that way given the differences in free speech laws - a lot of what is said in US is probably a crime [IANAL] in UK :)
UK's sovereignty is a joke.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-autonomy-cfo-sen...
> The evidence at trial demonstrated that for more than two years prior to the sale, Hussain, 55, a citizen and resident of the United Kingdom, used sophisticated accounting methods to falsely inflate Autonomy’s revenues to make it appear Autonomy was growing when it really was not. Specifically, Hussain used backdated contracts, roundtrips, channel stuffing, and other forms of accounting fraud to fraudulently inflate Autonomy’s publicly-reported revenues by as much as 14.6% in 2009, 17.9% in 2010, 21.5% in the first quarter of 2011, and 12.4% in the second quarter of 2011.
says that Autonomy HQ is in San Francisco, CA.
So, the sale has no bearing here? Pre-sale and post-sale it had offices in San Francisco.
I'm slightly confused, and forgive my ignorance: how do you channel stuff software? I mean, granted this is 2009 - 2011, but even back then were Autonomy really selling software as a physically packaged good, or is there some way that virtual goods can be channel stuffed? (E.g., selling a shedload of license keys to resellers, many of which remain unsold to end users? Would that be something that even applied to the software Autonomy made?)
EDIT: Similarly, for roundtripping, doesn't there need to be another company or companies involved? Doesn't there have to be some collusion? And if so, who are these other parties and why aren't we hearing about them?
EDIT 2: This might explain the channel stuffing comment, and provide some mechanism for it: "fraudulently concealed from investors and market analysts the scale of Autonomy’s hardware sales".
The roundtripping is not very clear. Maybe the same thing thru one of their acquisition companies?
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Irrelevant information: The us has extradition treaties with many countries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_the_Unite...
What do you mean "wrong"? They expressed an opinion, not a fact.
That you shouldn't be able to be extradited to a country you have nothing to do with, is something I agree with as well, but I wouldn't say it's "true". What is true today is that many countries have treaties to allow them to basically kidnap citizens of other countries. If you think that's good/bad, you should argue for one of those viewpoints, not necessarily if it's true/false.
I don't see anything on that Wikipedia page that says it would.
The more usual case for extradition is for returning fugitives who have left the country where they allegedly committed the crime.
> The treaty has been claimed to be one-sided[3] because it allows the US to demand extradition of British citizens and other nationals for offences committed against US law, even though the alleged offence may have been committed in the UK by a person living and working in the UK (see for example the NatWest Three), and there being no reciprocal right; and issues about the level of proof required to extradite from the UK to the US versus from the US to the UK.[4]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK–US_extradition_treaty_of_...
This only happens one way, with extradition to the US, thanks to worldwide bullying.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/02/972784817/2-americans-extradi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/business/carlos-ghosn-esc...
The morally correct way would be probably to go full Mossad and either kidnap, or disappear the perpetrator, but that can’t happen for political reasons. Same reason why Blackwater terrorists avoid consequences.
No, it doesn't. Sovereignty is inherently unlimited. Jurisdiction depends on the law of the party seeking to exercise it. Bringing someone before the court with jurisdiction may sometimes require external cooperation, but the terms of that are products of diplomacy; there's no hard and fast universal rules.
Its actually obligatory under treaties of near universal acceptance; though of course nations are free (and some do) choose not to exercise jurisdiction beyond their borders outside of those areas where treaty requires it. Though I think the more common choice is to apply jurisdiction both to citizens/nationals irregardless of location for at least some offenses as well as general jurisdiction over national territory.
Its true that some countries, like the US, are more inclined than others to assert non-obligatory jurisdiction over acts by foreigners on foreign territory.
Of course - such treaties, in order to be ratified by as many countries as possible, go for the minimum common denominator, which must be able to accomodate the views of such maximalists too.
Also, to be fair, the ranks of these maximalists tends to change with the fortunes of military power. France and UK, for example, used to be much more aggressive in claiming entitlements.
That isn't about "compatibility" of the laws. The US has extradition treaties with pretty much all of their allies but the conditions are mainly dictated by the US given their stronger position.
No country's laws condones war crimes and yet no international court even tried prosecuting any case of suspected war crimes committed by the US military because of things like this [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
My point is that it's not a one-way street. Countries extradite because they think it's in their best interest.
Indeed and that was my point. Treaties are signed despite significant disagreements in the law, that's not the driving factor you made it out to be earlier. The EU and the US historically disagreed significantly on things like the death penalty or drug related crimes yet the extradition treaties were readily signed. But interests are better served by avoiding retaliation.
The fact that the US has the death penalty is a commonly cited reason that other countries deny or hesitate to extradite.
Clearly, the parent comment's interpretation is correct in this context. The only other use I've encountered was #3, I believe in James Ellroy novels.
At least the US State Dept position is that she did have diplomatic immunity.
With more civilized countries, the idea is that the person accused is still being tried, but in its country court, with the assumption that if they are guilty, they will get sentenced anyways.
The US always puts it diplomats back on a plane ASAP after that sort of incident. My buddy in the foreign service ran someone over while on a tour and they did exactly the same thing. Back on the next flight out.
It sounds callous, but the person would otherwise become a scapegoat for the US.
People don't normally get incensed over non-DUI car accidents.
People were out for blood because her husband and allegedly she worked for US intelligence agencies. If she was just a tourist who forgot which side of the road she was supposed to drive on the case would just be in the local papers.
You can see it in this thread on hacker news. THEY WERE SPOOKS! STRING EM UP. Uh, no, they were working on a joint intelligence mission with the UK. The vast majority of intelligence workers are analysts and support staff not little green men.
The only reason for mentioning her being a spook is how she used that fact to escape.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/10/the-foreign-...
(And say what you like about Craig Murray, he was an ex-diplomat so should understand the rules around immunity).
The US and UK even changed the rule to remove diplomatic immunity from spouses of people at that base after the incident (but not retroactively), which proves she did have it at the time.
America aren't extraditing him - the UK is extraditing him.
I have no comment to make on Mike Lynch's guilt or innocence in this matter, because I simply don't know enough about him or about Autonomy (despite working in an office just across the road for 3 years leading up to the sale)[0], but tough to argue that HP wasn't mismanaged during this period, and therefore tough to assert that this mismanagement wouldn't have extended to Autonomy. Could this have made HP easier to dupe, or did they not get duped and just do a bad job? It's going to be weird if the outcomes of the civil and criminal cases end up disagreeing on this point.
And I think whatever the outcome, it reflects badly on HP: if he's not guilty then it adds weight to his assertion about mismanagement, and if he is guilty then it means they were duped during DD (and may in addition have mismanaged Autonomy). Neither of these is a good look.
[0] I do know a handful of people who have worked with and for Mike Lynch: some of them really rated him, some really don't. It's about what you'd expect for a prominent business executive. As I say, I have no basis on which to form any kind of opinion of him.
How is this relevant? If you get sold a computer, are delivered a turtle, and then kill it because you forgot to feed it, it can simultaneously be true that you were (a) incompetent and (b) defrauded.
It's entirely possible that we might see different outcomes in these cases. Maybe a difference in outcome between civil and criminal cases is a more common occurrence than I'm aware of (certainly O. J. Simpson springs to mind), but it seems unusual to me, and especially across international boundaries.
[0] Again, I haven't followed these goings on that carefully, but my impression is he's hewn pretty closely to this line of argument throughout.
If the actions weren't criminal, but instead the result of a CEO/company not using accounting best practices/pushing too aggressively then HP may not have a civil or criminal case.
The time that Microsoft failed to acquire Skype's IP comes to mind.
Huh, TIL! I had no idea about that: https://www.iam-media.com/article/648B260AFA518A71125F0E77C3...
That said, I don't believe that was why Skype lost relevance after Microsoft bought them: Microsoft was seemingly intent on compromising the Skype UX to promote the then-named Windows Live service - and they didn't combat the problems with spam on the service - and the ill-advised and ultimately reversed decision to force-convert Skype accounts into Windows Live accounts in a hamfisted way that left me personally with 3 duplicated accounts and no easy way of managing them - especially after they decreed that Skype will only support 1 account per Windows account in their flagship Windows 8-exclusive client and remove secondary instances from the legacy client, and the list goes on...
...I'd summarise it as them alienating their own fanbase and the tech-thought-leader community, which led to them (us?) seeking different platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Skype quickly becoming irrelevant.
When they relaunched Skype's new desktop client as an Electron app I knew they had stopped caring about it - because they immediately lost all of the advantages of having platform-specific clients, which is especially useful for video-conferencing due to the limitations imposed by Chromium (which are far better now than they were, but still...)
It’s not totally clear to me that Microsoft would actually be doing well in the space without the Skype aquisition, but considering they bought Skype for 8.5bn and Zoom now has a market cap of 100bn my assumption is that Teams is valuable and maybe the price was worth paying.
On the criminal side it's all going to hinge on whether the accounting practices rise to the level of fraud. That's trickier to nail down than you may think because a certain amount of liberty is often taken in trying to project growth, future earnings, etc. HP is likely going to present the subsidiary's poor performance as evidence that the accounting did rise above the level of normal wiggle room. The defense will surely attack that argument.
But as long as HP had access to enough of the company's finincial documents to identify the accounting practices in question it will be hard to prove out and out fraud.
Edit: ENRON is a good example because as clear cut as people believe that fraud was, it wasn't so obvious at the time. Writing down future contracts as earnings wasn't unheard of. They just followed that logic to an unsustainable conclusion. Which in the end clearly was fraud but it took hundreds of small steps and it's hard to say exactly when it did become fraud.
Prosecutions seem politically motivated. Punishments are unreasonably harsh (I suspect to drive plea deals over actual trials). The quality of your defence depends entirely on how much you have to spend. And there seems to be a weird bias making prosecution and conviction of foreigners more likely for no reason beyond them being foreign. The US also seems to like extradition for people who's crimes didn't even happen in America.
This case seems very much to fit that last criteria. If the deal was subject to British law, why isn't any accusation of fraud?
It doesn't help that our (I'm a brit) extradition agreement with the US seems filled with its own issues (extradition requires no evidence and doesn't seem to allow the usual defences). That's without getting into the humanity of us prison system.
Edit: Being down voted on HN is really annoying because it won't let you reply if your down voted. Even to replies to your comment. Thanks for your comments, I'll try and reply tomorrow!
I’m not disagreeing but he’s quite affluent so no worries “mate”.
I won't comment on his guilt/innocent. I don't know either way.
My smile is bemused/embarrassed that we've reached a point where he will go and stand trial in another country for an allegation of something that happened here, and whether he is found innocent or guilty won't really effect my opinion of him because my faith in the system is that low.
That makes more sense; thanks for the clarification.
Mike Lynch is the bad guy in this. Autonomy was an intentional fraud that was offloaded into HP - with the help of Goldman Sachs and Meg Whitman (if my memory serves correctly.) The fraud was well known in the small Cambridge tech community as their former workers warned others about it. It’s hard to overstate the effect Autonomy had on the UK tech scene. It split my former peers along ethical lines.
As bad as US justice is; in this case it may still be better than the UK.
Maybe because in the US prosecutors are elected / directly appointed by politicians, whereas in Europe they are in generally part of a self-selecting career bureaucracy.
Is that bad or unusual? It's no different than being required to appear in court in your own country 'without evidence' really is it?
IANAL but AIUI extradition just means one country will uphold the other's standard of compelling you to appear in its court.
(resp. also serving sentence if tried in absentia.)
Unusual, I don't know. Bad, yes, absolutely.
* In the uk you'll get police bail for almost all accusations (police bail means meaning released from jail, agreeing not to contact other people involved and not to leave the country). In the US I don't think you get bail, except for cash bail? And even then, you cannot go home or go to work, you're stuck in the US awaiting trial. Bye bye job. Bye bye marriage maybe given how long US trials, appeals, counter appeals etc are.
* The US and UK have pretty different justice systems. If you were dragged to the UK for trial, you can forget attorney client privilege. Or any real challenges to the evidence against you. Illegally collected evidence is still admissible here and if you confess to your solicitor, he has to plead guilty for you and inform the other side.
* Also, there are a lot of things that aren't crimes in one country but are in the other. Should you think about English law before you take actions in America? What if you're drunk in a field with your cow? That's illegal in the uk. Fancy coming over to be tried for it?
* the above leads to anothet issue: you can use extradition to bypass the constitution. You can be prosecuted for critiquing the president right, 1st amendment? Only you can, German makes it illegal to criticise foreign leaders, so Biden or Trump can ask them to extradite you, and have you tried there. Even though you've (presumably) never been to Germany. Sound good?
Extradition usually requires some evidence (the same as being charged locally). It seems weird the police won't have enough to hold me overnight, but I can be bundled onto a flight just because.
Extradition usually requires your crime to be committed in the place you're going for trial. That's partly to avoid stupid laws (ever critisized the king of Thailand? That's a capital crime over there) and party to make it clear who prosecutes (england prosecutes crimes in England where they're our problem, ditto the USA).
Edit: -3? Really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition#Bars_to_extraditio...
This is true, but Mike Lynch has plenty of money to spend on lawyers.
This is wildly untrue.
I've been rate limited. Its taken me 60min of hitting reply to you to get this comment in How come that only happens when I have a down voted comment so I just assumed.
Error message: You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
It’s possible then that HN has some other criteria that are limiting you? Possibly you go negative very often or something. I’ve also not hit a rate limit before either, though I rarely comment super densely.
The point is, being an arsehole is my right and asking about it is a hippa violation and my name is Karen and I want to speak to the manager! /s
Edit: thinking about it, I have been quite unpopular recently as I'm not super on board with big tech being evil or monopolies law being the right tool to fix it...
Edit2: I think this is the page I mentioned above
Autonomy acquired Verity, they were the largest enterprise search company out there and HP had high hopes with their e-discovery solutions paired with storage. They didn't learn from Microsoft's mistake.
and i guess some of his witnesses would be facing the same. A fair trial so to speak.
It is pretty telling that HP and US would like to have the guy prosecuted in US instead of UK - i mean i'm pretty sure that the alleged fraudulent inflation of the company valuation is a crime in UK too, and as it was supposedly committed in UK, it would be only natural to prosecute it in UK, yet they want to do it in US.
No worries though - i'm pretty sure that the guy flies a lot, and it is only a matter of time before US Marshals divert his plane into US airspace and the justice gets served cold.
In that context I think extraditing anyone to the US should be treated as a human right violation and as such should not be done.
And even if we ignore their prisons from a German Law POV a lot of their law is fundamentally in conflict with the values represented by the constitution and might also be in conflict with the human right charter, which at least for Germany (and potentially other countries, too) is another reason why extradition to the US should not be allowed.
Lots of people who would better be served in psychiatric units are housed in regular prisons.
There are historical factors which contribute to higher incarceration rates (poor, lack of opportunity, unemployment benefits structures (unreported income does not affect eligibility), etc which contribute to higher probability of running afoul of criminal law.
Moreover, you can see a marked increase from the '80s on. That strongly implies economic factors (in conjunction with Clinton's tough on crime agenda).
What precipitates this is the hollowing out of American jobs overseas. No longer could a high school graduate live on the income afforded by a HS graduate. As people's in the lower socio-economic rungs saw decreasing purchasing power, few alternatives were available to them. Steel Mills closed down, Shoe factories, Clothing, the FT cleaning crew was replaced by low wage imported labor, etc.
Some of the same reasons are seen in countries with populations of poor people. Belarus, Thailand, Bahamas, etc.
> People from BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) backgrounds constitute only 14% of the general population in England and Wales, but make up 25% of its prison population
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...
The right answer was admitting and addressing those terrible abuses and fixing the system.
You know, people always say this, but they never think of things from the point of view of all the people in mental wards who are not criminals and are defenseless.
Also, modern mental wards do not house anyone for very long. So they just aren't applicable for long term housing.
People who are arrested do sometimes end up in psychiatric units temporarily, and once they are "stabilized" then they get back into the legal system.
Prison in North Korea is much closer in spirit and implementation to Nazi concentration camps during the second World War, or the Soviet gulags. Many people die within months of being sent there.
I take your overall point, but here in the US police just execute people on the streets and then face no consequences for doing so. I continue to think the comparison fits.
Which is another name for "putting things in perspective" and "addressing all bad actors, not singling out one for the benefit of the other".
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Whataboutism
You can criticize some party or entity all you want, just make a logical argument free of fallacies. I don't abide using whataboutism to make false equivalencies. The US is nothing like North Korea. To compare the two, unless done extremely carefully, is insulting to people in the US, and demeaning the experience of people in North Korea.
To think of it another way, if you compare working in McDonald's to slavery, you're insulting the people that work for McDonald's and demeaning the experience of survivors of actual slavery.
ps. this is a better "whataboutism" link: https://theoutline.com/post/8610/united-states-russia-whatab...
That said, a similar argument does prevent the UK from extraditing anyone accused of a capital crime due to the death penalty being banned in the UK.
Not a "huge amount" no. But from what I've read and heard, definitely _an_ amount.
But then just because there is a similar problem elsewhere doesn't mean we should ignore either of them or only fix them together.
What are you talking about? This seems like a non-sequitur.
Excited to learn about the German prisons that respect human rights. The "prisoners" just come and go as they feel?
The whole point of prisons is to take away a human's rights. That's like fundamental to the concept of incarceration.
Or are you concerned with US prisons violating too many human rights in comparison to German prisons?
The main point of prisons is to temporary take away your freedom (which is often perceived as on of the most valuable rights) as a form of punishment for you crime, but that's where it stops.
You are sentenced to 10 years of prison not 10 years of torture, and potential random death.
If your arbitrary put people in solitary confinement, expose them to unnecessary risk from other inmates or risk of health due to absurd temperatures you are effectively arbitrary non lawfully adding additional punishments on top of the prison sentence a person has. Which is in direct conflict with what a state of law is supposed to be.
I mean lets say you committed a minor crime with a small prison sentence of but now you are forced to stay in a room which massively increases your chance of dying in the next few hours (heat+ heart disease), this means instead of being sentenced to 2 weeks of prison you are now sentenced to 2 weeks of prison + torture + a high chance to it arbitrary getting a death sentence.
Furthermore the worse the prison is the harder it gets to proper rehabilitate the person afterwards, which gets worse in the US due to treatments of ex-convicts. But again your sentence was 2 years in prison not 2 years in prison and hardly any chance to life a normal life afterwards even if you try.
The last point is even worse because it's not just bad for the convinced, it's especially bad for the rest of society which now has to coop with a increased crime rate as direct consequence of how prisons are handled. Which in turn will cause more people to be dragged into situations where they will commit crimes leading to a vicious crime increasing cycle.
There are more then just a few studies which relatively clearly show that treating prisoners as imprisoned but still human and help with rehabilitation will decrease effective crime rates and will in total benefit society, even if it might sometimes seem unfair in specific cases.
EDIT: To be clear the temperature is just one easy to understand example, but not the only problem and not applicable to all prisons. For people not aware of it, during very hot days some prisons get so hot that using ventilators or water vapor makes the situations worse, e.g. the are blown over by the ventilator is so hot that instead of giving your body a chance to cool it heats it up further.
> The main point of prisons is to temporary take away your freedom
The hoops people are jumping through to not acknowledge that prison is an explicit, intended violation of human rights are wild.
What does Germany have to do with any of this?
White collar crimes done by rich people go to white collar prisons. If you or I did this on a smaller scale we would probably go to regular prison but not a billionaire.
The remainder of the security levels - low, medium, and high - are the the kinds of places you see in movies with all of the attending violence, sexual assaults, and generally nightmarish life.
In the federal system, sentences for fraud are based on amount of loss. For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison - and there is no parole in the federal system. That length of sentence would require him to be kept at a high or medium security facility until his death - natural or otherwise - even though his crime was technically white collar.
Basically, if he is extradited to the US, he will never see the light of day, and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies. So deciding to extradite him is a really big decision. It’s not just a slap on the wrist - it’s torture until he dies.
Well, none of the charges has a life sentence available, so that option is not possible. It does look like the statutory maximum for the offenses at issue combined is 280 years, but I haven't bothered to pull out the sentencing guidelines and see if, even, with $11 billion in frauds, that's likely without factors not obvious from the charges.
> and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies.
Well, no, every rumored problem isn't real, and every real problem isn't experienced by every prisoner at all (much less daily.)
Is that not effectively a life sentence without the possibility of parole? So the point of your response is to point out that he will not get life, but rather, up to 280 years?
Well, no, every rumored problem isn't real, and every real problem isn't experienced by every prisoner at all (much less daily.)
You're trying to argue that he might not experience every horror every day - just some of them, depending on the day? Rapes occur daily in prisons. He might not get raped every day, but he almost certainly will over 280 years in a high security prison (since you claim that is not a life sentence). The rape problem in US prisons is so bad that there is actually a law called PREA - the Prison Rape Elimination Act [1].
I see that pedantry is still alive and well among some on HN.
[1] https://www.prearesourcecenter.org/about/prison-rape-elimina...
The claim was that he would be sentenced to life or hundreds od years based on the charges and the amount in controversy. I was pointing out that while the second option may be at least theoretically possible, the first was not.
(Are the two practically equivalent? Sure, but the claim was that the charges would support either sentence, not that it would support a sentence materially ewut to life in prison.)
> You're trying to argue that he might not experience every horror every day - just some of them, depending on the day?
I’m pointing out that depending on which rumored horrors you consider, they might never occur in reality at all (rumor and fact arr different things), and even the ones that are factual horrors might never occur to the vast majority of prisoners, and even ones that are more common might never impact a particular prisoner and, yes, even the ones that happen to impact a particular prisoner often don’t do so daily, so the claim that he would be subjected to every rumored horror of US prisons every day of his sentence relies on so many levels of hyberbole as to be beyond absurd.
6 hours of cursory 'scrutiny' before they decided to blow £8bn on the acquisition... I wonder if the (now ex-) CEO would be interested in buying my house?
And what was the rest of the board doing when the CEO decoded to trample on due process to get the deal over the line in a hurry?
Cathie Lesjak, the HP CFO, never even read KPMG's preliminary DD report (https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/business/finance-strategy/hp...).
Interestingly, the KPMG report itself can be downloaded from the above site and I have given it a brief glance (thus surpassing Ms Lesjak's pre-purchase attention).
It is pretty clear from the caveats and predicating statements in the report (e.g. 'We make no representation for the sufficiency of your purposes of the procedures you selected, and those procedures will not necessarily disclose all significant matters about Target or reveal errors in the underlying information, instances of fraud, or illegal acts, if any.') that KPMG was saying 'Look, bud - you hired us in a very limited capacity, knowing the data was bad: the consequences of this going belly-up are gonna be your problem, not ours'. To be fair, this is probably par for the course in many transactions.
What is interesting is that the report does look at revenue recognition, which is supposedly a major contributor to the eventual SNAFU (out by 38%!!! - see https://www.itpro.com/strategy/24554/hp-says-autonomy-revenu...).
Page 26 even says 'We understand that your auditors may provide a grace period post acquisition to perform a more rigorous analysis using the industry accepted calculation methodology.' (Did they do this?)
HP was determined to buy without looking under the hood because it was afraid it would be pipped to the post by Oracle.
Subsequently, the Serious Fraud Office dropped an investigation against Lynch and Hussain (CFO) because of insufficient evidence.
38% is material enough to not just be a 'to-mah-toe / to-may-toe' difference of opinion, so maybe there are grounds for a further grilling of Mr Lynch.
However, given the clear incompetence of HP's board and the shoddy DD they did, and the fact that the SFO could not find grounds to pursue the case, I would have thought that handing over a UK citizen to the US when he was at the time of the deal managing a UK co listed on the London Stock Exchange seems to indicate undue pressure has been brought to bear on the junior partner in the 'special relationship'.
I won't have much sympathy for either the incompetent or the shady (if this is the case) if they wind up in a relationship that has gotten messy, but this does not reflect well on the extradition reciprocity of US and UK.
Don't most startup founders fraudulently inflate the value of their startups?
"We are going after a 100 billion dollar market"
Yeah right ... only a tiny fraction of that market wants your product.
IANAL - That doesn't sound like fraud to me.
A highschool athlete saying 'they are going after attending the Olympics' isn't lying. A highschool athlete without Olympic experience saying 'they won a gold medal at the Olympics is lying.
The 100 billion dollar market will never be conquered by one company, and the pain point they are trying to solve often only applies to 1%-10% of that market and they know that, or they're BSing themselves.
Saying something that happened or that exists that is also an untrue statement is required for it to go from opinion to fraud. Support your opinion with falsehoods to get a sale. Fraud? Talk about goals of being a trillion dollar revenue lemonade stand? Go nuts.
Can someone please explain why is this company any different than any US company? In my eyes they are all artificially inflated. I love Tesla for instance but please P/E ratio of 654.03 isn't that the same thing? (it is genuine question)
Also isn't rule of market capitalism, if I am the seller I can put any price in the product/service I own, if you do not like my price you do not have to buy?!
As far as the seller determining the price, that’s true but the price they set is set on the basis that they aren’t lying about what they are selling you.
If someone sells you a pure gold box that turns out to just be aluminum wrapped in gold foil, that’s fraud even if you agreed to pay for the pure gold box. The seller did not provide the thing you agreed to pay for. It’s the same in this case, the seller allegedly lied about what they were selling to get HP to agree to an inflated price.
Personally, I think it is impossible HP has not seen something like that, or they have sent complete idiots to do due diligence.
" Corporate attorneys generally review all the company’s financial information from the last five years, including income statements, balance sheets, cash flow and audit reports. Other financial documents that may be reviewed include projections, budgets and forecasts for the financials of the next five years and assess whether they are reasonable. Finally, corporate attorneys generally review all credit agreements, debts and contingent liabilities. "
https://www.priorilegal.com/deals/mergers-acquisitions/manda...
Given the list of sophisticated financial fraud mechanisms charged, even if it WAS mismanaged, it was still fraud.
You can't fault Tesla for idiots buying the overpriced stock, as long as they don't misrepresent their results.
HP are big enough to hire anyone they like to do due-dilligence. Where is the negligence claim on who they did hire?
This was a listed company with audited financial statements. Where is the action against the auditors?
Americans generally hate hearing it but their courts a bit notorious for home-town decisions.
Anyway aside from that as Matt Levine is fond of telling us "Everything in the US is securities fraud." HP class action to follow. "The company management should have known it wasn't competent to do an acquisition and could be the victim of fraud to the tune of billions." I'll never get my head around an owner of the company joining the other owners of the company suing the company to be paid by the owners of the company.
edit: Never at all surprised to hear about financial dealings in the UK being potentially crooked.
> He denies allegations that he fraudulently inflated the value of Autonomy before the sale.
So the company is actually worth what? Let's say one half, $5 billion, and HP expects to make how much more? Let's say at least twice, $22 billion. That's a large margin. Unless they expected to make just $11.5 billion from it.
They are basically US territory if you are a criminal wanted enough.
English speaking people can also basically live everywhere in the world given how spoken the language is.
I’m usually quite the Atlanticist but in matters of extradition I think we should simply tear up those agreements. What’s the justice in the US being able to extradite autistic teenagers who’ve never set foot on American soil at the behest of MPAA and RIAA human scum, yet we can’t extradite a literal killer?
In the seemingly lopsided extradition treaty between the US and the UK.
(Which I was hesitant to comment on directly simply because we risk veering away from the core focus of HN - which is arguably the technology angle of this story rather than UK/US extradition policies)