In the end, there are still more questions than anything else. How Mike Lynch’s yacht sank so quickly off the coast of Sicily last Monday morning, tragically killing the 59-year-old tech tycoon and six others, will be the subject of inquiries for weeks and months to come. But the Autonomy founder also leaves a complicated legacy.

Obituaries have focused on his reputation as Britain’s Bill Gates, his role as science adviser to David Cameron and — of course — his spectacular defeat of the odds when he was acquitted on 15 charges of fraud in a San Francisco courtroom just a few months ago.

They have tended to gloss over how he and his former finance director, who was jailed for five years in the US and banned from working as an accountant in the UK for two decades, were found guilty of fraud at London’s High Court in 2022. Justice Hildyard opened his judgment by asking if the fallout from the $11.7 billion sale of Autonomy, a pioneering FTSE 100 company that analysed “unstructured” data such as information in documents and phone conversations, pointed to “fraud on a grand scale” or a “relentless witch-hunt”. He decided it was the former. Two years earlier, the accounting watchdog had hit Deloitte with a £15 million fine and severely reprimanded two former partners for allowing Autonomy to book transactions that artificially boosted its revenues and profitability.

Lynch returned from his American nightmare a free man, but it was very much a Schrödinger affair: he was simultaneously not guilty in a criminal case and guilty in a civil one.

He was probably a genius, certainly a self-made entrepreneur. Born in Ilford to a nurse and a firefighter, he won a scholarship to the Essex public school Bancroft’s and went on to Cambridge. He studied the work of Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century mathematician whose theory of probability inspired the name for Lynch’s boat years later.

Autonomy was spun out of Cambridge Neurodynamics, a fingerprint recognition start-up formed from the blocks of Lynch’s academic research. It floated — initially on Easdaq in Brussels and Nasdaq in New York, then the London Stock Exchange. To turn a university spin-out into a FTSE 100 tech giant, before tech took off as the hot sector, is an amazing achievement.

Advisers who worked with Lynch on his long fight against extradition say he was calm and gracious throughout, even at moments of intense stress. “He never lost his temper,” says one.

That was not the experience of those who crossed him in Autonomy’s growth years — especially analysts. Daud Khan, a critic at JP Morgan, said he was excluded from conference calls after writing negative notes, and that Autonomy lobbied his bosses to move him off covering the company. Paul Morland at Astaire Securities said Autonomy accused him of putting things he knew to be wrong in notes and accessing non-public information. At one point, Autonomy internally sorted analysts into various categories: “sound”, “drifter”, “feeble-minded” or “corrupt”.

According to the High Court and the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), Autonomy’s core offence was to pump up its numbers by passing off hardware sales as software sales. That might sound trivial, but software is very profitable as the cost of replicating a program once it’s been made is almost zero, whereas Autonomy actually suffered a loss on hardware. Software companies are valued much more highly than hardware firms by stock markets because of that cheap scalability.

Even a slight tweak to a quarter’s numbers was worth a lot to Autonomy. One analyst, who said he was “shocked” when the extent of the fiddling became clear in the FRC’s Deloitte write-up, reckoned the market would have wiped 30 per cent off Autonomy’s share price had it realised what was going on.We know what happened next: Hewlett-Packard, desperate to reinvent itself, ignored the warning signs and paid a huge premium to take over Autonomy in 2011. Meg Whitman, who replaced the hapless Léo Apotheker as HP’s chief executive, then wrote down Autonomy’s value by $8.8 billion. She sued Lynch and the finance director, Sushovan Hussain. The US Department of Justice brought criminal charges and Hussain went to prison.

Lynch’s camp always maintained that HP, riddled with internal politics, needed scapegoats — and that the DoJ’s action reeked of the American corporate-political complex. They were right. But so was HP when it said that Autonomy misrepresented its performance to the market. Autonomy’s accounts would have unravelled eventually, to shareholders’ detriment, had the original Silicon Valley start-up not blundered in and bought it.

After hearing the civil case, Justice Hildyard said it was a tragedy that “an innovative and ground-breaking product, its architect and the company will probably always be associated with fraud”. That has obviously been eclipsed by a far greater tragedy. But Lynch’s untimely death prompts another question, this one for HP.

Hildyard is expected to set the level of damages HP should receive shortly. It has asked for $4 billion. He has indicated it will get “substantially” less. Will HP — whose top ranks have changed entirely since Whitman launched the epic litigation war — try to enforce collection against its late foe’s estate? (The Sunday Times Rich List put Lynch’s family wealth at £500 million in May.) Or will it shrink at the prospect of being seen to pursue the widow of a man who had just 73 days to enjoy his hard-won freedom?

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, as the part of HP that owned Autonomy is now known, says it does not “think it appropriate to comment on the ongoing legal matters in these tragic circumstances”. As with so much about Lynch’s unbelievably sad story, we will have to wait for an [email protected]