By Paul Sandle
LONDON (Reuters) -Britain cannot delay a decision on whether to allow the extradition of tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch to the United States until the impending judgement in a civil claim against him is made public, the High Court in London said on Wednesday.
U.S. prosecutors want the 56-year-old to stand trial in the United States on fraud charges connected to the sale of Autonomy, the software company he founded and led, to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in an $11 billion deal in 2011.
Lawyers for Lynch had failed to stop extradition proceedings at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ court last year, pending the outcome of HP’s civil case against him.
The district judge in the Westminster court agreed he should be extradited and sent the case to British Home Secretary Priti Patel to certify the extradition order. However, Patel also wanted to wait until after the verdict was given in the civil trial before making her decision.
The judge, however, refused to move the deadline to March, instead ruling that Patel should decide by Christmas, a ruling which Lynch then challenged in the High Court.
However, the High Court judge Jonathan Swift on Wednesday rejected his application, saying it was for the lower court judge to conclude if there were grounds to delay the extradition decision.
The judgement on the Autonomy multi-billion dollar civil case will be made public in the next few weeks, two years after the trial ended, the High Court was told by a lawyer last week in a hearing for the extradition challenge.
Hewlett-Packard is suing Lynch along with his former finance chief Sushovan Hussain for more than $5 billion, alleging that they inflated the value of the British data firm before selling it.
Lynch and Hussain have denied the allegations.
HP bought Autonomy, whose software searches and sorts data, in 2011 but a year later it wrote down its value by $8.8 billion, saying it had uncovered serious accounting improprieties.
The U.S. software giant said Lynch was complicit in a series of fraudulent transactions to drive revenue growth at Autonomy.
(Reporting by Paul Sandle; editing by Michael Holden/Guy Faulconbridge)
