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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.
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.
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.
Yes, the originators of the language have clearly got it wrong.
Yes, the originators of the language have clearly got it wrong.
The funny collective-noun-plural-verb thing is an innovation by the Brits. In England, the language continued to develop during the 1800s and even 1900s, while it remained more or less fixed in the US (partly under the influence of Noah Webster) subsequent to independence. Thus Shakespeare writes "The army is discharged all and gone" in Henry IV, not "The army are discharged all and gone."