Autonomy's former CFO Sushovan Hussain sentenced to five years in jail

Hussain given fives years in jail, fined $4m and subject to $6.1m 'forfeiture payment'

Former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain has been sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted last year on 16 counts of wire fraud and securities fraud.

Hussain was sentenced yesterday by a court in San Francisco, California. He was found guilty in May last year and has been on bail for the past year. In addition to the five-year prison sentence, Hussain will also be subject to a further three years ‘supervised release', and has been fined $4 million and hit with a ‘forfeiture payment' of $6.1 million.

The forfeiture payment is the sum that Hussain is estimated by the court to have benefited from as a result of the premium paid for Autonomy by Hewlett-Packard.

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However, the judge did not also levy a ‘restitution payment' on Hussain, claiming that he was unable to accurately quantify HP's losses arising from Hussain's actions.

Judge Charles Breyer also denied an application for bail, pending Hussain's appeal. Judge Breyer argued that Hussain has no legal grounds for appeal.

In summing up, Breyer stated that Hussain had been involved in a "methodological long-term pattern" of making false statements and added that Hussain believed that in a high-growth business, such as Autonomy, future growth would effectively cover-up any false statements. Breyer also argued that Hussain had used his position to corrupt "a number of innocent people", chivvying them into becoming a part of the fraud.

The US Department of Justice, however, had been pushing for a 12-year prison sentence, arguing that Hussain had a fortune of around $60 million waiting for him when he comes out of prison, gifted to him by Autonomy founder Mike Lynch. It likened Hussain to "a James Bond villain or a Mafioso" and described Hussain as "an especially dangerous criminal".

Lynch, meanwhile, is currently in court in London, facing a civil action brought by HPE, the successor company to Hewlett-Packard.

HPE claims that Autonomy had engaged in a systematic fraud intended to make it look as if the company was growing faster than it really was. In particular, it claims that Autonomy also sold hardware to accompany its software sales, but disguised these by accounting for them under ‘marketing costs'.

However, Lynch claims that these deals were all above-board, that HPE has highlighted only a handful of supposedly questionable deals, and that HP barely did any due diligence on the purchase as it rushed to complete the acquisition to coincide with a disappointing quarterly results release.

Lynch's London court case has been covered from the High Court by The Register.

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