UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch called ‘massive fraud’ mastermind by US

UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch masterminded a “massive fraud” to dupe Hewlett Packard Co. into buying his software startup for $11 billion, a US prosecutor told a jury.

Lynch’s Autonomy Corp. used a number of accounting tricks to make its revenue growth appear better than it was, such as back-dating contracts, pretending to ship goods and overpaying for unnecessary services so vendors would then buy Autonomy products, Assistant US Attorney Adam Reeves said in his opening argument Monday at a trial in San Francisco federal court.