Presumably the antitrust investigators who looked at Microsoft back in the day had Windows software on their own computers. One could imagine that the prosecutors who brought accounting fraud cases against WorldCom executives might have used its MCI long-distance service. And any number of regulators around the world likely Google for personal and professional reasons.
Yet the use of a product that is used by a number of government agencies may hold up an investigation in Britain into the $10 billion acquisition of Autonomy in 2011 by Hewlett-Packard.
The computer maker disclosed on Monday that it had been informed that the Serious Fraud Office of Britain had opened a criminal investigation relating to Autonomy.
Hewlett has accused Autonomy of inflating sales and committing accounting chicanery before the sale. Hewlett took a charge of more than $5 billion in the November for what it said weredisclosure abuses. Autonomy’s founder and former chief executive, Mike Lynch, has denied the allegations.
Yet on Tuesday, the Serious Fraud Office cautioned that as a first step it needed to make sure that its use of an Autonomy product, Introspect, as a document management tool, did not pose a conflict of interest.
The British agency said in a statement:
The S.F.O. is keen to ensure that there is now no conflict of interest, or perception of such a conflict and it is obliged as a first step to make inquiries to ensure that it can continue as the investigating body. It is undertaking this work at present.
And what is Introspect A 2010 press release describes it as:
the world’s leading processing, review and production platform. Introspect is able to process petabytes of! ESI [electronically stored information], including more than 100 languages and 1,000 file types, and intelligently filters and culls the data to quickly reduce volume and gain visibility to the information contained within massive data sets. The Introspect processing services team carefully manages the critical processes of batch tagging and exporting the resulting set of documents, de-duplicating and extracting the metadata and preparing documents in a litigation-ready format.
If the Serious Fraud Office decides to proceed with its investigation, it will at least find itself on a level playing field. Clifford Chance, the law firm that is advising Mr. Lynch in his fight with Hewlett, also uses Autonomy products, as does the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.
