UK Edition
US court to seize Autonomy finance chief’s $100m shares
Autonomy's former finance chief will surrender his shares in Mike Lynch's venture capital fund to a US court as he appeals a fraud conviction over the British software company’s multibillion dollar sale to Hewlett Packard.
Sushovan Hussain, a British national who was Autonomy’s chief financial officer when the company was sold to HP for $11.7bn in 2011, was sentenced to five years in US prison in May after being convicted on 16 counts of fraud related to the sale.
Mr Hussain has agreed to hand over his shares in Invoke Capital, which owns a majority stake in the cybersecurity company Darktrace, to secure bail as he fights the sentence.
The shares could be worth more than $100m (£83m), according to the US government, although Mr Hussain’s legal team has disputed this.
Mr Hussain has appealed the conviction and was granted bail in June, but has been unable to pay the $10m that would enable him to avoid prison despite his substantial holdings in Invoke, with his legal team arguing that the shares are illiquid.
On Friday, a San Francisco judge ordered that Mr Hussain deposit his shares in ICP Darktrace, the arm of Invoke that handles its stake in Darktrace, by this Thursday.
US District Judge Charles Breyer said the deposits were appropriate to ensure that Mr Hussain, who is subject to GPS monitoring and restricted to travel in Northern California, does not flee.
Dr Lynch has been separately charged in the US, although he is yet to travel to the country to face the allegations and is expected to fight any attempt to extradite him from the UK.
HP is also suing Dr Lynch and Mr Hussain in the UK in a lengthy £5bn civil fraud trial, which is due to run into next year.
Autonomy, whose software was used by companies to make sense of “big data”, was the biggest ever sale of a British software business at the time, but HP alleged fraud just a year after the sale. It claimed Dr Lynch and Mr Hussain had inflated its revenue, while Dr Lynch says HP mismanaged the company and attempted to use it as a scapegoat for its own underperformance.