
Autonomy misled HP about finances, Hewlett Packard says - finknotal
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20412186
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masukomi
I worked for a company that was Acquired by Autonomy. They made us fire a
large portion of our staff before the final papers were signed so that they
could continue with their claims that they never fired people as the result of
an acquisition.

Slimy Bastards if you ask me. This does not surprise me in the least.

~~~
politician
It doesn't sound like your old company was all that principled either...

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manishsharan
Wasn't Autonomy a public company when HP acquired it ? Was it not the
responsibility of HP board and management and their investment bankers to do
due diligence before they made such a big acquisition ?

Could it be that HP management , having lost the position of largest PC maker
to Lenovo, is looking to throw our attention away from their incompetence.

~~~
pisarzp
I agree. This story is quite hard to believe... Nobody spends $12bn without
looking carefully into the books. There always is a long and thorough Due
Diligence process on transactions like this one. Investment bankers, lawyers
and accountants get get their fees mainly for going through every single
document in the company...

~~~
chucknelson
Apparently Deloitte was supposed to do this, with KPMG as a safety net. It
took a third (and also expensive) consulting firm (PwC) to notice issues.

I wonder if there will be any client fallout at either Deloitte or KPMG for
this. Probably not...

Maybe HP is just trying to blame it on them? Who knows!

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ridruejo
"We did a whole host of due diligence but when you're lied to, it's hard to
find," Are you kidding me? That's the whole purpose of doing due diligence in
the first place.

~~~
rayiner
The purpose of due diligence is to uncover mistakes and ensure that the books
are in order, not to uncover fraud or wrongdoing.

~~~
olefoo
And one of the mistakes you should be looking for is the possibility that you
are being lied to so thoroughly that it's hard to know what's real and what
isn't. It's in situations like that, that forensic accountants earn their
salt.

~~~
wangarific
And even if they don't earn their salt, your lawyers should protect you in the
representations and warranties section of the definitive agreement.

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j_col
> Autonomy founder Mike Lynch is a non-executive director of the BBC.

Way to go journalistic impartiality at the BBC.

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bonaldi
There could be a technical concern here, but practically speaking the BBC is
so impartial it will happily half-destroy itself in the name of journalism.

Their _own Director-General_ just had to resign after a grilling by BBC
journalists on BBC programmes. If they'll do that to their own boss, some guy
from Autonomy has 0 chance of special treatment.

~~~
simonw
Extremely well put.

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robk
This surely will hurt the reputation of Lynch. The other news reports have
quotes saying in effect this was perpetrated by senior management and that the
whistleblower who came forward is still at HP/Autonomy, which by inference
seems to point a rather stern finger at Lynch.

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gadders
I have no comment on Autonomy's finances. We did however evaluate it's product
vs Google's search appliance.

The Google Appliance we pretty much plugged in and let it do it's thing. After
a few days it was giving excellent results on our massive (80,000 people)
company intranet.

The Autonomy server had to be constantly tweaked and fiddled with to even get
it near to the relevance of the results.

Unfortunately, Autonomy had flogged a loads of licenses to another part of the
business for peanuts, so we had to go with their inferior product.

