59-year-old Mike Lynch, the so-called “Bill Gates of Britain” and his 18-year-old daughter, were found dead on Wednesday. Lynch was on the yacht celebrating his recent acquittal on US fraud charges following a 12-year legal battle over the sale of software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. The extremely strange thing is that just two days before the Bayesian sank in rough seas off the northern coast of Sicily (in the early hours of Monday), the partner of British tycoon Mike Leeds, Stephen Chamberlain died in a car accident in Britain!
According to “Politico”, the collaboration between the two men did not end in 2011 with the sale of the company. After selling Autonomy that year, Lynch co-founded cybersecurity firm Darktrace, appointing Stephen Chamberlain as CFO. The news agency points out, however, that what appears to be a simple coincidence takes on another dimension when one considers the ties of the two business partners to the British and American secret services.
Network of spies
Mike Lynch founded Darktrace in collaboration with a former British intelligence officer in 2013. In fact, one of the company’s co-founders and CEO was Stephen Huxter, a high-ranking MI5 official. Huxter hired 30-year GCHQ veteran Andrew France as the company’s chief executive at first, who later joined the agency’s board. As for Lynch, he remained on the board until 2018, when he resigned following fraud charges. Former MI5 chief Jonathan Evans also sat on Darktrace’s board for a time, while 17-year US National Security Agency (NSA) veteran Jim Penrose previously headed the company’s US operations. The coincidences are too many to pass up.
James Bond fan
Lynch spun off Autonomy from Neurodynamics in 1996. The company, which Chamberlain joined in 2005, used “machine learning” to analyze data from sources such as intercepted phone calls and emails. “They pose the most interesting problems”, he had declared in 2002, in the magazine “Wired”. Autonomy has also won high-profile tenders from UK and US government agencies. In an article the Guardian described the company as “dealing with classified information” and “among the few UK commercial organizations that stand to profit from the Iraq war”.
As a fan of the fictional spy James Bond, Lynch named the conference rooms at Autonomy headquarters after villains from the film series, such as “Dr. No” and “Goldfinger”, while it is said that the company’s reception area had an aquarium full of piranhas, as a tribute to a scene in the film series “You Only Live Twice”. In April 2024, Darktrace agreed to a $5.3 billion acquisition by American private equity firm ThomaBravo.
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