It is with deep sadness that I heard the reports of the death of Mike Lynch and his daughter.
He was a bold, upright and modest man desperately wronged by the American justice system. And that he and his teenage daughter should reportedly have died while celebrating that justice was finally done is unutterably miserable for his family and those who knew him. Pray for the repose of his soul and that of his daughter.
Lynch was the victim of an injustice caused by our extradition agreement with the United States.
In 2023 after years of battling through the courts, Mike Lynch was extradited to America on criminal fraud charges, where a court ordered him to pay a $100million bond with 24-hour armed guards ensuring he did not flee the country.
Jacob Rees-Mogg pays tribute to tech tycoon Mike Lynch
GB News
In 2011 he sold his software company, Autonomy, to Hewlett Packard for £11billion. He was subsequently accused of illegally inflating the value of the firm, but he had done nothing wrong.
Merely Hewlett Packard had bungled the deal, ran the company badly, and with hindsight, thought he had paid too much.
Lynch was acquitted of all charges on June 7 in a trial in San Francisco. It was within this context that I met him when he came to discuss his case last year.
And what his case pointed to was an absurd asymmetry in our extradition agreement with the United States and a risk of double jeopardy, as the UK regulators had already concluded that he was innocent.
It stems from the 2003 treaty with the United States designed to streamline the process of extradition, but it seems to operate against the interests of innocent Britons. Lest we forget the case of Harry Dunn, a 19-year-old British man who died in 2019 following a road traffic accident. The car that killed him was being driven on the wrong side of the road by an American spy, Anna Sacoolas.
She was whipped out of the country, and a diplomatic row unfolded as the Americans refused to extradite agent Sacoolas.
But at the time of Mike Lynch’s acquittal, any sale to an American company is plainly seen by the American Department of Justice to fall under American rules and regulations, no matter where in the world it is.
He went on to say that he would be very cautious of any deal if he were a British tech entrepreneur because he would never know that five or 10 years later, he wasn’t going to be carted off to America to face a partisan case in a partisan court.
We must stop being so subservient to the United States on these matters. It is the duty of the British state to protect its citizens. The case of Mike Lynch represented an abandonment of that principle.
The special relationship does not mean we blindly follow orders from our American overlords, but rather, we should stand up for our interests as the US does for its, especially when justice is at stake, as it was in the case of Mike Lynch.