Epstein’s defender goes to war to keep ‘Britain’s Bill Gates’ out of prison
James Titcomb
6 min read
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Reid Weingarten’s list of former clients reads like a who’s who of high-profile Americans who have ended up in court.
The veteran lawyer, one of the US legal system’s most celebrated white-collar defenders, has represented Enron executive Richard Causey; the WorldCom chief executive Bernard Ebbers; and the filmmaker Roman Polanski.
Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei chief financial officer, hired him after she was detained in Canada on US fraud charges.
Weingarten, of East Coast firm Steptoe and Johnson, also represented Jeffrey Epstein in the weeks after the disgraced financier was charged with sex trafficking in 2019, until Epstein’s death by suicide a month later.
The attorney was reportedly considered for Donald Trump’s legal team while the then president battled investigations into the 2016 election.
This week, Weingarten will stand up in a San Francisco courtroom to defend another client, the British businessman Mike Lynch.
Thirteen years after he sold his software company Autonomy to Hewlett Packard and more than five years after he was charged, Lynch, 58, will stand trial on fraud charges that carry a combined sentence worth several decades in prison.
Lynch and Autonomy’s former finance director, Stephen Chamberlain, are accused of artificially inflating the former FTSE 100 company’s revenues and misleading the company’s auditors before it was sold to HP for £7bn in 2011.
Lynch made around $800m (£630m) from the deal and was feted as “Britain’s Bill Gates”. Autonomy’s sale was the biggest ever involving a British technology company and the takeover was seen as a huge success.
However, HP swiftly wrote off much of Autonomy’s value and accused Lynch and other executives of falsely inflating its worth.
Reid Weingarten has likened his job to life in the French Revolution, 'defending the nobility against the howling mob' - Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images
The company’s founder has spent the last decade denying wrongdoing. Both he and Chamberlain have pleaded not guilty. Lynch argues that HP’s dysfunctional management and changes in strategy destroyed Autonomy’s value, and that the company’s former bosses have put the blame on him.
The trial has been a long time coming. Lynch hired Weingarten in 2013, a few months after HP wrote down almost all of Autonomy’s value. Both the US Justice Department and the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) started investigating the claims, but the SFO never prosecuted. It was not until late 2018 that federal prosecutors charged Lynch.
In the years since then, his lawyer has diligently flown to California to represent him, mostly without Lynch present. Lynch initially held off from travelling to the US, and spent years resisting the Justice Department after it requested his extradition in 2019.
It was not until last May that he finally boarded a plane to California and was detained before posting a $50m bail, made up of shares in the British cybersecurity company Darktrace.
Since then, Lynch has been largely confined to a $35,000-a-month house in San Francisco’s upmarket Pacific Heights neighbourhood, featuring panoramic views of the bay and Golden Gate Bridge. For months, he was only allowed out for court dates, medical appointments and family visits (his bail terms have since been relaxed).
He wears an ankle tag and is monitored at all times by armed guards from corporate security company Keelson Strategic, whom Lynch pays for.
Weingarten has represented Lynch at regular hearings, enjoying a good-natured if usually fruitless dialogue with Charles Breyer, the federal judge who will oversee the trial. Weingarten has sought to chip away at the US case, challenging what evidence will be allowed at trial and seeking to throw the case out on the grounds that the US does not have jurisdiction over allegations regarding a UK company.
Breyer, a former Watergate prosecutor and the brother of former Supreme Court judge Stephen Breyer, has largely rejected these requests.
Lynch may yet try to argue once again that the US is stepping out of bounds by bringing the case. In January, he sued the SFO in English courts seeking documents that he hoped would prove the Justice Department had brought its charges too late, and that the statute of limitations on fraud had expired. Lynch and the SFO settled the case, without disclosing what the fraud office would hand over.
The series of challenges has racked up large legal fees for Lynch. A Bloomberg profile of Weingarten stated that he charged around $600 an hour – in 2002. Lynch’s legal team in London included Lord Pannick, Boris Johnson’s partygate barrister who is also representing Manchester City, who charges a rumoured £5,000 an hour.
Chris Morvillo, another lawyer for Lynch, told the US court last year that his client’s assets are estimated at between $400m and $450m.
A substantial proportion of that has been made up of shares in Darktrace, the cyber security company Lynch helped found using the proceeds of Autonomy’s sale and which counts several Autonomy employees as executives. Chamberlain was Darktrace’s chief operating officer until he was charged, while Lynch had sat on the company’s board and been an adviser.
Neither now has a role at the company and both Lynch and his wife Angela Bacares have been selling down their Darktrace stakes in recent months, meaning they are likely to lose the right to nominate a board director, his last formal connection to the business.
Lynch’s four-day-a-week trial is likely to be lengthy, taking around two and a half months – six weeks for the prosecution and four weeks for the defence. The US Justice Department has submitted a 70-person witness list, though the final list of witnesses will be whittled down.
The Justice Department list includes Leo Apotheker, the former HP chief executive who ordered the Autonomy acquisition in 2011 just weeks before being ousted by the company’s board, and Frank Quattrone, the legendary dotcom era tech banker who helped sell Autonomy.
Leo Apotheker sanctioned HP's Autonomy deal weeks before he was ousted - Paul Grover
Lynch himself will inevitably take the stand. Darktrace’s chief executive, Poppy Gustafsson, has already given evidence remotely from London on request of Chamberlain’s defence.
The odds are stacked against Lynch. Few criminal defendants charged by the Justice Department are acquitted. His lawyer, however, has a strong track record. Meng, the Huawei executive, was allowed to return to China as part of a plea deal.
Weingarten also represented David Rainey, the former BP executive accused of lying to investigators over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He was acquitted on all charges.
The attorney may command a high price, but he has insisted there is a moral dimension to his work. He has described himself as a child of the Sixties and is close friends with Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general, with whom he started a foundation to help rehabilitate juvenile criminals.
When asked how he squared that with defending the rich and famous, he told Bloomberg: “I feel like I’m in the French Revolution, defending the nobility against the howling mob. They want to guillotine these people without any evidence.”
Lynch may be inclined to agree with that characterisation. Thirteen years after pulling off Britain’s biggest ever tech sale, his fate now rests in the hands of a jury – and his star lawyer.
