Death of tycoon’s ex-partner not ‘untoward’ – police
Cambridgeshire Police/PA Media
British police say there is no evidence that the death of a former colleague of missing technology tycoon Mike Lynch is “suspicious or untoward”.
Stephen Chamberlain, 52, died in hospital after being hit by a car while running in Stretham, Cambridgeshire – near his home in Longstanton – on Saturday.
Mr Lynch is one of among those missing after the yacht Bayesian sank in a storm off Sicily on Monday.
Cambridgeshire Police said officers had not been in contact with Italian police and were not going to Italy.
Reuters
Mr Lynch and Mr Chamberlain were business partners and had been defendants in a fraud trial in the United States earlier this year.
American prosecutors made fraud allegations over the $11bn (£8.6bn) sale of Mr Lynch’s software firm, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard in 2011.
Both were acquitted.
Mr Chamberlain had been a finance executive at Autonomy, co-founded by Mr Lynch in 1996.
Hewlett Packard (HP) had won a multibillion-dollar civil case, after suing Mr Lynch, in the High Court in London in 2022.
Reuters
“All we can do is investigate the incident in our county and so far there is no indication of anything suspicious or untoward and we are satisfied this is a tragic road collision,” a Cambridgeshire Police spokeswoman told the BBC.
“We are investigating the collision on Saturday but officers are not going out to Italy.”
She said Cambridgeshire officers had not been in contact with Italian police investigating the yacht sinking.
Mr Lynch, 59, whose daughter Hannah, 18, is also missing, was raised near Chelmsford, Essex, and had a home near Pettistree, Suffolk.
He studied at Cambridge University and in 1991, helped establish Cambridge Neurodynamics – a firm which specialised in using computer-based detection and recognition of fingerprints.
Autonomy was created five years later, using a statistical method known as “Bayesian inference” at the core of its software.
