On a bright and blustery Thursday in San Francisco, Mike Lynch finally took the stand in the marathon criminal trial that could land the 58-year-old behind bars for the rest of his life.
He raised his right hand, swore to “tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth”, and then politely blasted the US Department of Justice’s portrayal of him as a mafioso-style fraudster who cooked the books of Autonomy, his British software firm, to dupe Hewlett-Packard (HP) into paying billions of dollars for what amounted, allegedly, to a “massive” fraud.
“It’s surreal,” Lynch said. “I’ve heard comments from people that just don’t paint the picture of the company that I and my colleagues and friends worked at for 15 years. I’ve sat and
