The tragic misfortune of Mike Lynch

Twice I met the tech tycoon Mike Lynch, once a decade or so ago and again this year, shortly after he returned from his fraud trial acquittal in California. On the first occasion, I followed him as a speaker at a corporate conference in, of all places, the National Football Centre in Burton-on-Trent. He was the star of the show and we exchanged barely a nod. In those days – after he sold his software company Autonomy to Hewlett Packard of the US for $11 billion, but before his career was overtaken by HP’s allegations that Autonomy’s accounts were fraudulent – he had a reputation for arrogance in business which did not help him rally support against the extradition process that eventually took him to a San Francisco courtroom.

But at the second encounter – a private party in London – he was chastened, chatty and instantly likeable. I hoped to get to know him better but now I never will.

He’s the lost leader of British tech who could have done so much more as an innovator and a venture capitalist. The least I can do in his memory is to continue to highlight the scandalous one-sidedness of the 2003 US-UK extradition treaty which has thrown a succession of British corporate defendants into the ruthless jaws of US justice – and in a bizarre way, since the fatal yacht voyage was planned as a celebration of his court victory, determined Lynch’s tragic end.

What’s Revolut worth?

Is Revolut really worth £35 billion? Founded in 2015 as a low-cost foreign exchange app by Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, Revolut is still a private company and only a month ago received the full UK banking licence it first applied for in 2021. But it already serves nine million UK customers – despite some accounting hiccups along the way, and a relatively high incidence of online fraud which resulted in 3,458 judgments issued by the Financial Ombudsman Service last year, compared with 2,332 for the much larger Lloyds.