US claims UK hasn’t got means to rapidly bring Mike Lynch to trial

Mike Lynch arriving at his extradition hearing

Credit: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg

Refusing the extradition of Mike Lynch to the US would cause a “potentially vast” delay in bringing a possible criminal trial in the UK as the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) would struggle to read through 100m pages of evidence, a US government lawyer has claimed.

Speaking in the final day of a week-long extradition hearing, Mark Summers QC claimed handing the case to the SFO — which reserved the right to launch a criminal prosecution against the Autonomy founder — would cause a delay of several years.

“The SFO aren’t merely not in the foothills, they haven’t got their boots on,” he claimed, adding that they would struggle to review the evidence that the US government has amassed against Mr Lynch. “The US government has that, is on top of it and is ready for trial,” he continued.

The US government is seeking to extradite Mr Lynch to face a series of criminal fraud charges in the US over the $11.1bn (£8bn) sale of his software business Autonomy to HP in 2011. 

HP claims it was defrauded by Mr Lynch and Autonomy’s finance chief Sushovan Hussain. It accuses them of underreporting the company’s costs and falsely inflating revenues and profits before the deal, including by booking hardware sales as if they were more lucrative software products.

Mr Lynch is also a defendant in a $5bn civil fraud trial brought by HP in the High Court. Mr Lynch denies wrongdoing.

Alex Bailin QC, representing Mr Lynch, denied the claims that the SFO would struggle to speedily bring a case to trial. 

“The notion that the SFO could not cope with this sort of disclosure is simply pejorative speculation,” he said. “His portrayal is of an office that would be barely capable of disclosure in a case like this.”

The extradition hearing is set to resume on May 4. A decision on whether Mr Lynch will be extradited to the US is expected to be made following a verdict in the High Court trial.