Wife’s £20m share sell-off before tycoon Mike Lynch extradited

The wife of British technology tycoon Mike Lynch sold around £20 million of shares in cybersecurity group Darktrace in the months leading up to his extradition to the US.

Angela Bacares and Lynch together own more than 10 per cent of the £2 billion company. She sold around 1 per cent of Darktrace’s total stock in a series of deals between January and May.

The sales came before Lynch, who was once dubbed ‘Britain’s Bill Gates’, was extradited to the US last week after losing an appeal in the UK High Court.

He faces fraud charges in the US over the £8 billion sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011.

The US has accused him of cooking the books at his former firm and duping HP to overpay for it – which he denies. He could spend a decade behind bars if he is found guilty.

Lynch was one of Darktrace’s original backers when it was founded in Cambridge more than a decade ago. He and his wife remain two of the firm’s largest shareholders with a stake worth £200 million.

Last year, Hewlett-Packard won a civil fraud case against Lynch. A High Court judge ruled that Lynch defrauded the company by manipulating Autonomy’s accounts to inflate the value of the group.