Mike Lynch’s co-defendant in a recent US fraud trial has died after a road accident a few days before Mr Lynch went missing.
Stephen Chamberlain, the former vice president of the finance company Autonomy, was hit by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire on Saturday morning, his lawyer said.
Mr Chamberlain had faced the same charges of fraud and conspiracy as his former boss – one of six people reported missing after a luxury yacht was struck by an unexpectedly violent storm and sank off Sicily early on Monday – for allegedly scheming to inflate the value of Autonomy, then Britain’s largest software firm, before it was sold to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.
The pair were acquitted of all 15 charges by a jury in San Francisco in June.
In a statement on Monday, Mr Chamberlain’s lawyer, Gary Lincenberg, who described him as a “dear client and friend”, said he had died after being “fatally struck” by a car while out running in Stretham.
At the weekend Cambridgeshire police had appealed for witnesses and information after a man in his 50s was taken to hospital with serious injuries.
Meanwhile, a search for Mr Lynch, 59, is still under way after a UK-flagged superyacht named Bayesian sank.
One person is dead and the British tech billionaire, who owned the 56-metre vessel (183ft), is one of six people missing.
Mr Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter Hannah is among those missing after his yacht sank, local media reports, however his wife Angela Bacares is confirmed to be among the 15 people who were rescued after it capsized at about 4.30am local time (3.30am UK time) on Monday.
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Mr Chamberlain worked as Autonomy’s vice president of finance until he left in 2012 to work as chief operating officer for cybersecurity firm Darktrace.
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He also volunteered as a finance director for Cambridge United, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The sale of Autonomy was the biggest tech takeover of a FTSE 100 firm at the time – but HP wrote down £5.5bn of the company’s value within a year, claiming revenue streams were inflated.