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Serious Fraud Office Drop Investigation Into Autonomy Accounting
mrspoonsi sends up an update on the investigation into Autonomy, a software company acquired by HP in 2011. HP paid a staggering $11.7 billion in the deal, then later wrote off $8.8 billion and claimed Autonomy's management intentionally defrauded them. The UK Serious Fraud Office opened a case on the matter in 2013, but that investigation has now been dropped. According to the Office's press release, they felt there was "insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction," given the information they had to work with. Autonomy is not off the hook, however — the case has now been entirely ceded to U.S. authorities.
As a DevOps engineer I was momentarily confused by the headline. Having had my usual 4 pints after work, i'd attributed the error to malted hops and barley. The reality however was that I'd failed to remember UK government and administrative offices have very immediate names. In america we take care to cloister our offices in overly broad vague names.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So, in their quest to be like Facebook and Google by snapping up technology for obscene money, they forgot to do "due diligence", and now they are pissed?
HP used to be such a great technology company, until they switched to the printer ink scam... At least they sold off their bench test equipment designs to a company that is still producing fairly nice stuff.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
For executive gross negligence in failing to do proper due diligence before completing their horrible acquisition of Autonomy and then covering it up by attributing it to fraud.
Autonomy is not off the hook, however â" the case has now been entirely ceded to U.S. authorities.
Handed over to the U.S. Petty Fraud Department, where a slap on the wrist and a generous tax break for HP will be quickly administrated. Move along. Nothing to see here.
HP paid silly money, all the details of Autonomy's accounting numbers were right there in the books, anyone who read the books said "you're stupid to pay that much", Oracle said as much publicly after they turned it down, saying it was way overpriced.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/electronics/8796470/Oracle-and-Autonomy-row-escalates-as-Larry-Ellison-accuses-Mike-Lynch-of-lying.html
"Mr Ellison claimed in an earnings call last week that Autonomy had been "shopped" to Oracle before the British software company agreed its controversial $11.7bn (£7.1bn) sale to Hewlett Packard"
""After listening to Mr Lynch’s PowerPoint slide sales pitch to sell Autonomy to Oracle, Mr Kehring and Mr Hurd told Mr Lynch that with a current market value of $6 billion, Autonomy was already extremely over-priced."
The price HP paid NEARLY DOUBLE, the price that Oracle refused to pay as overpriced.
The valuation was insane, based on FUTURE growth not present value, and growth is illusive, based on OPINION not fact, because nobody can see into the future. So you believed managements OPINION as to future growth and didn't estimate your own numbers, HP.
Now they try to get a prosecution because management willfully misled you? They painted too rosy a future? F*off. You're just incompetent. Oracle correct said it was overpriced, and you didn't, and paid nearly double the price Oracle said was too much.
It's just another way to put away some money under their beds at home. Clever accounting, that's all.
HP has a very long history of buying companies only to unload them for cents on the dollar a few years later. Remember Palm and WebOS? Take a look at the HP Acquisition List on Wikipedia. Not many of those companies were good buys.
This was another of many issues that contributed to staff depression while I was there and continues to this day. We could see it was wrong, but could do nothing about it.
They used to be the company engineers wanted to work for. When I got to Pixar in '81, the engineers that had been at HP were still proud of having worked there. It's really sad what's happened.
Bruce Perens.
As a sidenote, it's annoying how in that welcome sign picture, the light fixture blocks the text "invent" on the sign. It's badly planned.
Which photo?
I have not been at HP for a long time, of course.
Bruce Perens.
I just meant the Wikipedia article.
Remind us how much they had to write off after they'd bought EDS, whose star was already on the wane (because customers had sussed the business model). Utterly predictable.
Ha, this is very funny. These acquisitions made so that management can rake in huge rewards but when they go wrong because of greed on the part of the company acquired, then all hell breaks loose.
NewsCorp for MySpace, Apple for Beats, Facebook for WhatsApp, HP for 3Par & Compaq, and Microsoft for the AOL patents...
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
They used to be the company engineers wanted to work for. When I got to Pixar in '81, the engineers that had been at HP were still proud of having worked there. It's really sad what's happened.
They are now the company IT managers want to work for.
Today's HP internal management culture is one where technical staff is being sneered at and technical ignorance is a badge of honor.
The company has lost it's way some time around the Compaq merger and is now slowly rotting from the inside.
I'm sure the value of the assorted C level executives that profited from this purchase is higher than that of your average stockholder. While a few retirement funds, etc. may have been burned, their controllers get paid regardless, so they probably won't raise much of a stink