Rebirth of England.

Chapter 775 Mike Lynch
The reason why Barron didn't want to have too much contact with Mike Lynch was that he didn't want to be too deeply involved in a future transaction of Autonomy...

In Baron's previous life, in October next year, HP, which hopes to expand its business scope, will acquire Autonomy for US$10 billion!

You know, earlier, Lynch wanted to sell Autonomy to Oracle for $60 billion, but was rejected by the other party...

In the end, Lynch still had a way to sell Autonomy at a high price, allowing HP, which was trying to catch up with competitors such as IBM in the enterprise application software market, to acquire Autonomy at a sky-high price of $110 billion...

The most important thing is that this transaction is still an acquisition in the form of cash!

In fact, this acquisition by HP was promoted by HP CEO Leo Apotheker. At that time, the acquisition was criticized by Silicon Valley for being too expensive and was strongly opposed by the company's CFO, but it was ultimately approved by the board of directors.

The reason why the HP board of directors approved the acquisition at the time was that they trusted the financial audit report on Autonomy by the auditing firm Deloitte.

As part of its due diligence, HP also hired KPMG to audit Deloitte's report, and investment banking intermediaries such as Barclays Bank were also involved in the acquisition transaction.

Neither Deloitte nor KPMG were able to discover any problems until Autonomy founder Mike Lynch was fired in April 2012. A senior member of Autonomy's leadership team took the initiative to "leak the news". HP discovered through investigation that Autonomy had a series of questionable accounting and business practices, which led to serious deviations in its valuation when it acquired the company.

Finally, HP discovered that the Autonomy company they acquired a year ago was not worth $110 billion at all. They recorded a non-cash goodwill impairment charge in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012, and the charge related to Autonomy was worth $88 billion...

The bulk of that - more than $50 billion - was related to serious accounting misconduct, misrepresentations and disclosure errors.

This also means that in just one year, HP has lost 110% of the $ billion it spent on acquiring Autonomy.

Since then, HP has started to sue Autonomy founder Mike Lynch, known as the "British Bill Gates", and tried to extradite him to the United States for trial...

This lawsuit can be said to have lasted for more than ten years like a marathon...

The final result was that twelve years later, he was finally found not guilty. Then two months later, the cruise ship he was on encountered a tornado at sea. Most of the crew members on the ship survived, but Lynch, his family and defense lawyer died in the accident.

It seems like an accident...

Well, around the same time as this accident, Mike Lynch's partner and another defendant in the HP case, Autonomy's former vice president of finance Stephen Chamberlain, was hit and killed by a car while jogging.

This is also the reason why Barron doesn't want to have too close contact with Mike Lynch.

It’s not that Barron is afraid of being the mastermind behind Lynch and a series of “accidents” in the future. In his previous life, Barron didn’t think so much about this matter. He just regarded it as a curious thing.

But now with his status and position, looking back at this matter, although he cannot directly guess who is behind the scenes, it is obvious that it is not HP - and after so many years of litigation, HP has not been able to convict Mike Lynch in the United States. If a certain force behind the scenes used physical means to deal with him and his partner Stephen Chamberlain, then the power of the other party is just like that...

Of course, it is possible that the capital or forces behind Autonomy could deal with Mike Lynch and others to silence them, but that... is another story.

After all, when Autonomy was sold to HP for a whopping $110 billion, Mike Lynch himself only received about $ billion, and more of the profits went to other shareholders and the capital behind them...

If they were ruthless enough, after Mike Lynch was acquitted, it was obvious that the first suspect of the public would be the "furious" HP, and this was a very successful diversion of attention. The reason why Baron did not want to be involved too much in this was that he did not want to be caught in the whirlpool of public opinion because of this matter - now his fund only holds 25% of Autonomy's shares, and by the way, a small profit in the transaction next year is enough.

In addition to this, the reason why Digital Future invested in Autonomy is because this company's technology is indeed unique in acquiring certain intelligence.

The intelligence system controlled by Barron uses Autonomy's technology to filter intelligence from some public information. This method is still very effective...

"Dear Duke, I'm glad you're in America again..."

Barron quickly put the matter of Mike Lynch behind him, and today his Long Island estate welcomed another guest, an old friend of the Kennedy family, Robert Kennedy Jr.

After O'Connor took office, it was clear that the Kennedy family was active again.

This is not surprising, after all, Obama himself received great support from the Kennedy family in the previous election.

As mentioned before, there are no particularly talented political descendants of the Kennedy family. The few who have entered American politics have performed far worse than the three Kennedy brothers...

Therefore, they can only look for potential politicians to win over and make them the spokespersons of their families.

To a certain extent, Ao Guanhai is now playing such a role.

Of course, even so, the relationship between them can only be described as more of a cooperation, and not too close.

But at least now the Kennedy family has gained more capital in politics.

Well, there is a similar relationship between the Kennedy family and Barron.

In America, Barron needs the influence of his family at certain times, and the same is true for the Kennedy family, so that when the interests of both sides are consistent, they can have good cooperation.

"Although you were not in America before, I often heard about you at gatherings, Your Highness..."

"Oh?"

"For example, you have made several big moves recently, which have attracted a lot of attention."

"Are you talking about Pfizer and those other companies?"

Barron smiled and said:

"I manage assets for many people, so I always need to make sure they get a satisfactory return. I have never hidden my opinion and have always said that I am very optimistic about the future recovery of the U.S. economy..."

(End of this chapter)