Lynch’s action marks the latest twist in a long-running battle between HP and Lynch that has led to multiple lawsuits over who is to blame for a disastrous deal that cost HP shareholders billions of dollars of value.
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An HP spokesperson’s response was: “As we allege in the Particulars of Claim, for more than two years prior to HP’s acquisition of Autonomy, Mike Lynch and Sushovan Hussain conducted a systematic and sustained scheme to make Autonomy look like a rapidly growing, pure software company whose performance was consistently in line with market expectations”.
Mr Lynch said: “Over the past three years, HP has made many statements that were highly damaging to me and misleading to the stock market. Worse – HP knew, or should have known, these statements were false”, said Lynch today.
HP’s $11bn (€9.82bn) purchase of Autonomy was supposed to form the central part of the United States group’s move into software.
He believes that HP acted incompetently over the acquisition and that caused the relationship to fall apart.
In his counterclaim, Dr Lynch laid out his argument that the failure of the Autonomy takeover was the result of HP incompetence.
“Before going ahead with the acquisition they discussed firing their CEO”, he claimed.
Lynch is referring to KPMG’s due diligence report (PDF) that HP was recently forced to reveal.
Documents lodged on Thursday at the High Court stated: “Dr Lynch has suffered significant reputational damage and been unable to pursue business opportunities available to him following his departure from Autonomy”.
Left without its top advocates within HP, Autonomy was forced to fend for itself against a tide of office politics and misguided policies that seemed to undercut the merger’s chances of success at every turn, Lynch has claimed.
He wants to make HP’s CEO Meg Whitman appear in court.
The Autonomy acquisition proved to be a disaster for H-P.
In fact, HP Chairman Ray Lane made a last-minute attempt to convince then-CEO Leo Apotheker to call off the deal, according to a Wall Street Journal report from last week that cited an analysis commissioned by HP and written by its legal firm in early 2014.
HP responded to Lynch’s lawsuit by calling it a “laughable and desperate attempt to divert attention from the $5 billion lawsuit HP has filed”.
HP could not be reached for comment.
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In November 2012, Hewlett-Packards general counsel said that Autonomy misrepresented its gross profit margin and also falsely created or miscategorized more than $200 million in revenue over a two-year period starting in 2009.
