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The target of the protection, says Zachary Terwilliger, a former US prosecutor and associate at regulation agency Vinson & Elkins, was to “humanize” Lynch. “As a protection lawyer, you wish to make your shopper relatable to the jury, even when they’re a millionaire,” he says. The federal government, in the meantime, was aiming to “beat again the protection narrative: This isn’t some folksy man named Mike, that is Dr. Lynch. That is somebody that focuses on each excruciating element,” says Terwilliger.
The majority of the trial was taken up by testimony from greater than 30 authorities witnesses—a ranging solid of Autonomy insiders, whistleblowers, and HP executives, amongst others. The witnesses testified to Lynch’s function in fooling auditors, analysts and regulators in regards to the state of the Autonomy’s funds, thus main HP to overvalue the corporate. Lynch was the orchestrator, they alleged, of a cautious marketing campaign to inflate the software program firm’s gross sales figures by misdating and misclassifying gross sales and interesting in a apply often known as round-tripping, whereby software program resellers had been successfully supplied with the funds to buy Autonomy software program.
Within the UK civil trial, Lynch had tried to deflect related fraud allegations by claiming that the underperformance of Autonomy after the acquisition was the fault of HP, which had used him as a scapegoat for a deal gone dangerous. This avenue of protection was dominated out prematurely of the felony trial by the presiding choose, Charles Breyer, who directed that solely proof referring to the interval previous to the deal, when the fraud was alleged to have taken place, can be admissible.
As an alternative, Lynch was left to argue that the monetary gymnastics allegedly carried out at Autonomy had nothing to do with him personally, however different executives, like Hussain, the CFO. The protection was “constructed on the concept of a division of labor,” says Terwilliger. “The protection says that, even when what you’re saying truly occurred, my shopper didn’t find out about it or wasn’t concerned.”
Lynch’s argument performed on the wonderful distinction between neglience—a failure as chief govt to take care of efficient oversight of firm funds—which doesn’t quantity to fraud, and a willful blindness to the misconduct of different members of a company. “Willful blindness shouldn’t be a protection,”says Stephanie Siegmann, one other former prosecutor and associate at regulation agency Hinckley Allen, however negligence may very well be.
On the finish of the trial, in an unconventional step, Lynch took to the witness stand to plead his case. He described to the jury his “surreal” expertise of the trial, sitting by as a “parade of witnesses I’ve by no means met” recounted “a sequence of transactions I’ve no involvement in, accounting choices I’ve no involvement in, and never a lot else.”
Though the choice to testify risked exposing Lynch to cross-examination by prosecutors, it gave him the prospect to enchantment on to the jury. “Regardless that it’s a calculated danger, in some circumstances defendants have been in a position to persuade jurors,” says Siegmann. “The jury assesses the credibility of a witness—they decide whether or not he’s telling the reality. They [could] decide that he didn’t intend to defraud.”
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