The Nasdaq Composite had its worst day in nearly two years on Wednesday as investors rotated out of Big Tech. More than $200 billion of market value was wiped off the value of Nvidia, the chip manufacturer, alone. The S&P 500 similarly retreated and, along with the Nasdaq, suffered further losses on Thursday.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, rattled markets after a Bloomberg interview was published on Tuesday night in which he appeared to be dismissive of America’s interest in defending Taiwan, where the majority of the world’s supply of microchips is produced. The supply chain of almost every big technology company has interests in the island nation, which is under military threat from China.

Trump’s remarks came as investors were already feeling nervous about whether stock valuations of some of the world’s biggest companies were starting to look stretched. The so-called Magnificent Seven, made up of Alphabet (the owner of Google), Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Nvidia and Tesla, account for about a third of the S&P’s entire value after their share prices surged this year, driven ever higher by the market and corporate optimism surrounding AI.

Investors were already starting to shift away from heavyweight stocks into companies with smaller valuations as the prospect of the US Federal Reserve cutting interest rates in September encouraged a search for value in the broader market. Smaller-cap stocks typically are more exposed to borrowing costs than the cash-rich, big technology companies and so stand to benefit from a change in monetary policy.

Dan Ives, a New York-based analyst at Wedbush Securities and a longstanding technology bull, is unfazed, though. “We just believe the bark [of Trump] is worse than the bite,” he said. “It’s a game of high-stakes poker in a political campaign. And the AI party, it’s 9pm [and] that goes to 4am. We don’t think that Trump, if he wins, turns the music off at the party.”

Ives compared 2024 with 1995, at the start of the dotcom boom, when the internet drove rapid rises in company valuations before the bubble burst spectacularly in the early 2000s. “I believe it’s a 1995 moment,” he said. “I think numbers go much higher. And the AI revolution, it’s only the early days of this all playing out.”

Analysts are predicting strong second-quarter earnings next week for Alphabet, followed by Microsoft, Meta and Apple the following week, which could support stock market valuations.

Alphabet’s stock has risen by 28 per cent in the year to date amid optimism about the AI capabilities linked with its Search and YouTube businesses, as well as AI-driven demand for its cloud infrastructure services.

Microsoft, seen to be leading the AI revolution after forming a partnership with OpenAI back in 2019 and integrating the latter’s technology into its products, had risen by 19 per cent this year before it took a hit to its value today amid the global technology crisis that affected its systems.

Meanwhile, shares in Meta, the owner of Facebook, have risen 37 per cent this year. It, too, is investing heavily in AI research and product development.

So far, so good, but not everybody is buying into the story that such growth can continue. Citigroup’s analysts recently advised investors to start taking profits from “AI high-flyers” and to “re-balance toward a broader array of AI stocks across the value chain”.

Moreover, valuation rises have been concentrated in only a small number of interconnected companies, which amplifies the investment risk, some analysts have warned. Nvidia performs well because Microsoft, Google and Meta are buying its chips.

Stuart Kaiser, Citi’s head of equity trading strategy, said the market reaction to results next week was difficult to predict because expectations had been driven so high. “Our guess is they’ll put up, at minimum, solid results and potentially stronger results,” he said. “The question will be, in this environment, with tech stocks under pressure, is ‘good’ good enough or do you need to be better?”

He added that while Citi agreed with the transformative potential of AI, it had been “very, very hard to pick winners and losers”. Of its AI basket of 36 stocks, only 14 are up in the year to date. Volatility among smaller shares in the sector has encouraged investors to crowd around the biggest players, such as Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple, which have strong stories around how AI can drive the growth of their businesses.

“If I told you, ‘I’ve got this software stock and they’re going to be a winner in AI and they’re spending X billions of dollars over the next three to four quarters to build that capability,’ you really are taking a leap of faith that they’re going to invest that money correctly, and then some time four, eight or twelve quarters later you’re going to see the revenue or the cost savings,” Kaiser said.

“I think that’s why people are playing it close to home and are saying, ‘If you’re a stock that can prove to me you can generate [revenue] or a cost saving visibly now, I’m in.’ Otherwise, these stocks really need to be very convincing in terms of what they’re doing.”

Scepticism around the transformative potential of AI on companies’ costs and revenue is growing on Wall Street. Jim Covello, head of global equity research at Goldman Sachs, argued this week that AI wasn’t built to address the complex problems it would need to solve in order to earn an adequate return on the $1 trillion estimated cost of developing and running AI technology.

“We’re a couple of years into this and there’s not a single thing that this is being used for that’s cost-effective at this point,” he told Goldman Sachs Exchanges, the investment bank’s podcast. “I think there’s an unbelievable misunderstanding of what the technology can do today. The problems that it can solve aren’t big problems. There is no cognitive reasoning in this.”

Daryl Jones, director of research at Hedgeye Risk Management, a Connecticut-based investment research company, believes the technology bull run would continue. He sees the biggest market risk in the longer term as inflation accelerating again after predicted rate cuts later in 2024.

“In the short run, these interest rate cuts should continue to be good for the market generally, maybe even continue to build the small-cap rally,” he said. “But as we roll through into the end of the year and then next year, the bigger risk looming, I think, is inflation re-accelerates and we look back at these rate cuts and realise that maybe [it was] too soon.”

Analysts are doubtful whether Trump’s latest comments would reflect future policy should he win the election in November, but there are plenty of other reasons to expect more volatility around technology stocks for the rest of the year.

I remembered this last weekend as I fleetingly, but endlessly, remembered that I needed to respond to an important work email that had been sent to me late Friday afternoon. But, first, a sacrosanct Saturday morning run, then a few hours on the road for work and interviewing someone for a magazine, then England’s penalties, then a dinner with friends, then the lawn mowing, then the driving to Sports Direct to ask staff to take the security tag off a child’s shin pads that they failed to remove the previous day, then, well, life.

All of it stopped me sitting down, collecting my thoughts and answering it properly. I finally responded at 9pm on Sunday night. It took no more than 15 minutes of my time, but the mere consciousness of it had worried me all weekend.

That is because the unanswered email has an enervating effect, able to produce a low-level anxiety, a nagging dread that you are in a communication deficit with the sender.

There are now 370 billion emails sent every single day, and while many of those will be from nice Russian ladies with pictures they want to send, they are not the problem. Junk mail, newsletters, updates from a museum whose mailing list you ended up on — they’re fine. Blitzing my inbox of all that stuff is as invigorating a way to start the day as an espresso.

The ones that demand an answer are the problem. A McKinsey report suggested that knowledge workers spent 28 per cent of their average day reading and responding to emails.

Last week I attended the Nudgestock, the entertaining annual ideas festival put on by Ogilvy, the advertising agency. The theme was time, and some of the talkers explored how many businesses falsely assume we value speed over experience, that the rapid self-checkout is better than a slower interaction with a supermarket worker, that 20 minutes shaved off a train journey is superior to a dining car and good onboard wi-fi.

Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy’s vice-chairman, said in his talk: “One of the worst mistakes we ever made was we made email instantaneous. We should have built in a two-hour buffer. Now, everyone has to check their email every ten or fifteen minutes on the off-chance someone has sent them a time-sensitive email. The burden falls on the recipient, not the sender, to sift the urgent messages. It has been a productivity disaster; in fact, a total catastrophe.”

It got a loud laugh because we all know it to be true, yet do nothing about it.

The two-hour buffer is not a new idea. Tim Ferriss, the American investor and podcaster, wrote about a similar idea in his The Four-Hour Workweek, a book that led to a tsunami of thought leaders on LinkedIn wanging on about how they awake at 3am to meditate and schedule date nights before their deal-making.

Ferriss suggested creating an auto-response to all emails, telling people that “due to high workload” you only check email at 9am and 2pm. If it is urgent you can telephone. His suggested sign-off was pure Silicon Valley arrogance: “Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you better.”

A twice-a-day check may work for many emails but it fails to take into account that many fall into the category of “the hyperactive hivemind”, the canny term coined by Cal Newport, professor of computer science and author of A World Without Email. This is where office workers, especially those working from home or the other side of the world, treat email as if it were an always-on collaboration tool, “in which most problems are solved with ad-hoc, back-and-forth messages”, Newport writes. He calls this a “misery-making machine”.

• Slow Productivity by Cal Newport review — how to avoid burn out at work

Batching emails to arrive only every couple of hours or twice a day doesn’t solve this problem, because various colleagues are left in the lurch until you deign to descend from your “deep focus” ivory tower to answer the message.

Newport has various solutions to this, involving moving all collaborative work on to a separate platform, such as Google Docs, complex multiple email accounts, different folders and fiddly two-factor authentication to ensure you can’t casually log in to check an account. He only half jokingly says he’d like a system whereby you have to do 15 push-ups before you can access your emails.

This may work for him, but then again in his book Digital Minimalism he describes how he has no social media accounts and leaves the house without his phone. He already has the willpower to stop incessant checking whether your email inbox has waiting for you an exciting and lucrative job offer or a 10 per cent discount on swimming trunks.

There is a happy medium, however, between Ferriss’s passive aggression and letting the incessant messaging overload you. And that’s embracing an idea the new government is supposedly going to introduce: the right to disconnect.

You will never clear your desk or answer all those emails by Friday close of play. Accept this fact. So why not at Friday, 6pm, set an out-of-office auto-response saying you are away and people should call if there’s anything urgent. Being away could mean a trip to the garden centre; the sender does not need to know this. But at least it stops the mere consciousness of an unanswered email ruining the weekend.

Harry Wallop is a consumer journalist and broadcaster. Follow him on Twitter @hwallop

Lynch is a dog lover. He and his wife, Angela Bacares, have six: two dachshunds and four sheepdogs. But this one, Faucet, is special. For more than a year Lynch, known as “Britain’s Bill Gates”, and Faucet were under house arrest in America.

Lynch was extradited from Britain in May last year and spent 13 months under house arrest in San Francisco as he awaited trial on 17 charges of conspiracy and wire fraud — later reduced to 15 charges — brought by the US Department of Justice. If convicted, Lynch, with an estimated net worth of £500 million, faced up to 25 years in a US prison, where, given his age and a serious lung condition, it was unlikely he would have lived to see freedom. “I have various medical things that would have made it difficult to survive,” he says, settling into a tastefully appointed sitting room that is far removed, in every respect, from the hard wooden benches of the California courtroom where his fate hung in the balance.

• Mike Lynch cleared on all charges over Autonomy deal in US fraud trial

The case stemmed from what should have been Lynch’s crowning achievement: the $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion) sale in 2011 of Autonomy, the business software company he co-founded, to the American tech giant Hewlett-Packard (HP). The deal turned the father of two — whose daughters were nine and six at the time — into one of Britain’s richest people. But within a year HP, which refers to itself as Silicon Valley’s original start-up, founded in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939, claimed that he had cooked the books, and thus tricked it into paying $5 billion more than it should have for a company packed to the gills with fake sales and all manner of financial jiggery-pokery.

So began a 12-year transatlantic legal fight that led to Lynch’s extradition. As he contemplated the end of life as he had known it — science adviser to David Cameron as prime minister, recipient of an OBE for services to enterprise in 2006, status as one of his generation’s brightest minds — Faucet was by his side the whole time. They now seem almost surgically attached.

“The problem is this,” he says, gesturing to the pup that has leapt on to the couch as soon as Lynch sits, propping itself against his neatly pressed slacks. “We spent all our time together, so he wants to be here all the time. He still sleeps on the pillow next to me.”

His chances of winning were infinitesimal. Less than 0.5 per cent of federal criminal cases in America end in acquittal. And there was potentially damaging legal precedent: Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy’s former finance director, had already been convicted for his part in the same alleged crime. Hussain, who was born in Bangladesh and came to Britain when he was seven, was sentenced to five years in prison by Charles Breyer, the eccentric, bow tie-wearing San Francisco judge who would also hear Lynch’s case. Hussain, who started his sentence at the Allenwood penitentiary in Pennsylvania, returned home to Kent in January, before Lynch’s trial kicked off in March.

And in 2022 a British High Court judge ruled in a civil case brought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), one of the two companies HP split into in 2015, that Lynch had in fact defrauded the company. Mr Justice Hildyard is expected to rule on damages before the end of the year.

On June 6, however, Lynch beat all the odds. After a 12-week trial in the wood-panelled courtroom on the 17th floor of the San Francisco federal building, he was acquitted by a jury on all counts. When the jury foreman read out “Not guilty”, Lynch cried. So did his wife, who sat in the front row of the gallery for the entire proceedings. So did several of the young lawyers on Lynch’s legal team.

From the day HP went public with its allegations, Lynch had always maintained his innocence, arguing that he was being railroaded by a powerful American corporation stricken with a severe case of buyer’s remorse. It took more than a decade and $30 million in legal fees to get someone finally to agree with him, and just like that Lynch was free.

In his first interview since the verdict he recalls that life-altering moment. “When you hear that answer, you jump universes,” Lynch recalls, emanating a mix of defiance and disbelief. “If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.”

Now the court-ordered armed guards who had been with him 24 hours a day could be dismissed. He could remove the ankle tag and escape the gaze of the surveillance cameras that had been installed in every room of the San Francisco mansion to which he was confined. He was given back his passport and the $100 million he had handed the federal government as collateral to prevent him from fleeing.

He could see his daughters, who are now 21 and 18, return to his beloved farm near Aldeburgh in Suffolk and greet his dogs, all of them named after engineering parts: Switch, Tappet, Pinion, Valve, Cam. As Faucet was acquired to keep him company in San Francisco, Lynch gave him an Americanised name.

And now, in the sitting room of his west London pile, Lynch appears to be a man still grappling with his new reality, a cork bobbing on an ocean of relief. “It’s a very strange situation to now be in a different mindset where you’re back,” he says through tears. “I stood on Piccadilly Circus the other day, which has the most enormous permanent traffic jam, and I’m just thinking, ‘This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.’ ”

So what does he do now? One project he feels deeply passionate about is the one-sided extradition treaty between the UK and the US. “It has to be wrong that a US prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England than the UK police do,” he says. He is also keen to fund a British equivalent of the Innocence Project, the American nonprofit organisation dedicated to freeing people who have been wrongly convicted. “The system can sweep individuals away. There needs to be a contrarian possibility that’s saying, ‘Right, well, the whole world thinks you’re guilty but, actually, was that a fair conviction?’ ”

For the moment, though, he is concentrating on doing nothing. “You don’t realise how tired you are until you stop and have a chance to be tired,” he says. “It is that sort of exhaustion in your bones.”

What he has been doing, however, is contemplating a mountain of what he calls “Saint Peter questions”. He explains: “So you arrive at the Pearly Gates before being dispatched to the elevator down to the basement, and you say to Saint Peter, ‘You know, just before I go, what was that all about? What was that?’ ”

It was August 18, 2011, and Mike Lynch was on top of the world. “This is a momentous day in Autonomy’s history,” he declared. He had just unveiled the blockbuster sale of Britain’s biggest tech company. “From our foundation in 1996,” Lynch said, “we have been driven by one shared vision: to fundamentally change the IT industry by revolutionising the way people interact with information. HP shares this vision.”

It was the culmination of an unlikely trajectory that began in Ilford, east London, where Lynch grew up as the son of Irish immigrants. “You had to learn to run fast,” he says. His mother had emigrated in the early 1960s and worked as a nurse. Lynch’s first job was as a cleaner at the same hospital. “I’m still a demon mopper,” he says. “There’s an art form to it, you know.”

A gifted student, he earned a scholarship to Bancroft’s School in Woodford, east London. He did well enough to win a spot at Cambridge University, where after a degree in natural sciences he earned a PhD in signal processing, used to detect patterns in vast sums of data — a precursor to today’s artificial intelligence systems. A boffin at heart, he stayed on as a research fellow, and in 1996 launched Autonomy. At the time the company was just a handful of “eccentric people working really hard on a project. No bureaucracy. No admin. Lots of late nights, lots of eating cold pizza.”

By the time HP came calling 15 years later, Autonomy was the most valuable tech firm in Britain, employing 2,000 people across 20 countries. Some of the world’s largest companies, such as AT&T, BNP Paribas and BlackRock, relied on its software to make sense of their mountains of data.

Lynch was an intense and driven boss. He pulled off countless takeovers, gobbling up competitors and growing the business ever larger. He clashed with critics. Daud Khan, a City analyst who was among the first to publicly question Autonomy’s accounting practices, said Lynch waged a “vendetta” against him, banning him from Autonomy investor calls. Khan testified in the US and UK trials. Lynch has denied having a vendetta against him or any of his critics. The High Court judge in London called Lynch a “blunt and dictatorial” executive who “expected to get his way, and did so”. Lynch admits he was “hard-charging”, but that such an attitude is required to build a big business. No one could deny that he had built Autonomy into what appeared to be that rarest of birds in corporate Britain: a homegrown tech success story.

Leo Apotheker saw salvation in Lynch’s empire. The softly spoken 57-year-old German chief executive of HP was under immense pressure. He had taken over the year before with a mandate to save a fading Silicon Valley giant. As Apple’s iPhones and iPads sold like hot cakes, HP rolled out laughably clunky rival products that few people bought. Sales of its printers and PCs had gone into reverse. So Apotheker made a bet: he would break up the 72-year-old behemoth, jettison the PC arm and buy Autonomy. In so doing he would transform HP into a seller of business software, which, by its nature, delivered far fatter profits in a fast-growing market.

So desperate was Apotheker to buy Autonomy, he paid a 64 per cent premium — the percentage mark-up over a company’s stock market value. That was twice the typical rate that London-listed companies sell for. It was an offer that, under UK takeover rules, Lynch was duty-bound to recommend. “One of the great mythologies was that I had a choice to sell,” he says. “It would have been like trying to stop a herd of elephants.”

The deal turned many of Autonomy’s longest-serving employees into millionaires, and meant a $516 million payday for Lynch with his 8 per cent ownership stake. But he didn’t plan to cut and run. He had agreed with Apotheker to stay on and head the new division.

HP investors, though, hated Apotheker’s plan. The shares tanked and just five weeks after announcing the takeover Apotheker was fired. He was replaced by Meg Whitman, the 55-year-old rock-star tech executive who had just spent $140 million of her own money only to lose a painful race for California governor. “Suddenly we were the unwanted stepchild,” Lynch says.

HP was in worse shape than perhaps Whitman had appreciated. Six months after the deal closed she fired Lynch, along with 27,000 HP workers. Hundreds of Autonomy employees had also begun to leave because HP failed to deliver them promised share options.

Even in the best case scenario, the Autonomy takeover was “high risk, high reward”, Lynch admits. Getting rid of its key architects, as well as the entire Autonomy executive team, doomed it to failure.

Lynch recalls the day he realised that this was going to be complicated. “I was in London and this message comes through on my phone that they’ve written Autonomy down. This didn’t surprise me because I knew from the grapevine they had lost all the good people,” he says. (A writedown is when a company reduces the value of an asset on its books, in the same way a home’s value can plunge if, say, the market crashes or the roof blows off.) “And then the second message came through: they were blaming the accounting. I remember thinking, ‘This is insanity.’ I naively thought that about three weeks later there would be some sort of ‘we didn’t mean that, we meant this’. And it would all be done. Boy was I wrong.”

That afternoon HP announced a huge $8.8 billion writedown, admitting that it had, in effect, paid four times more for Autonomy than it was worth just one year later. But this was not just a deal gone bad. HP claimed to have uncovered large-scale fraud at Autonomy, alleging that “serious accounting improprieties” accounted for more than $5 billion of the lost value.

Against the advice of his PR handlers, Lynch went on TV that day to defend himself. “The scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life was to go on Channel 4 News live when this broke,” he says. “HP cut us off at the knees, but they didn’t kill us.”

The US Justice Department opened an investigation, as did the UK’s Serious Fraud Office. The SFO would drop its case in 2015 for lack of evidence, but HP, having gone public with its explosive claim, went in for the kill. According to court documents it devised a detailed PR plan called Project Sutton to make sure key journalists, politicians and regulators knew that Autonomy, and by extension, Lynch, were to blame. The plan involved convening a “truth squad” of HP employees to monitor stories, feed documents to reporters detailing the alleged malfeasances and “preserve the credibility” of Whitman, who was thought still to harbour political ambitions. Among Whitman’s jobs was to personally write to the prime minister, David Cameron, lest HP lose any key government contracts in Britain.

“This case is going to be great for future scholars,” Lynch says. “You have ‘How to run a PR smear campaign in 2012’. You can get the documents now and look at how it was done.” He adds: “It was like being hit with a tsunami. We were always playing catch-up.”

The slow-rolling legal fights that followed took a toll. Lynch’s brother, a builder, died while Lynch was confined in San Francisco, so he missed the funeral. His mother also died before the trial. “They never lived to see this resolved,” he says ruefully.

His daughters didn’t know any reality other than the one where their father has been publicly labelled a crook and that he may spend the rest of his life behind bars. “I remember early on sitting them down and the analogy I gave my six-year-old was that Daddy had sold someone a plant. They hadn’t watered it, it had died, and they were trying to blame Daddy for this,” he says. Now 21, she has followed in his footsteps and is reading physics at Imperial College; her 18-year-old sister will study poetry next year at Oxford.

“There was a long period when they thought I would somehow fix this, but the nearer we got to the date, the more they understood that this was a battle.”

The Metropolitan Police handled his forced removal last May in a rather British manner. Instead of walking him out of his Chelsea home in handcuffs, they allowed him to meet them round the corner. The Americans were very American. As soon as the US Marshals took Lynch into custody at Heathrow, they put him in chains and bundled him on board a United Airlines flight, stuffing him in the back row before anyone else boarded.

They handed him a San Francisco Giants cap to help shield his identity and draped a coat over his shackles. “Once you’re handed into American custody you’re in a completely different world,” Lynch says. “It’s ridiculous. You’re in chains, even though, like, what are you going to do? As you can see, I’m not exactly an Olympic boxing champion.” Indeed, as the saga has worn on, Lynch’s closely cropped hair has greyed, his waistline has expanded. It all looked rather bleak. “I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone, because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back.”

However, he had a few factors in his favour. One was Sushovan Hussain, his No 2 at Autonomy, who, unwittingly, had acted as a sacrificial lamb. By studying Hussain’s hearing, Lynch’s legal team could see in detail the government’s case and devise a better plan to defend against it. “It’s very sad that Sushovan had to go through that,” says Lynch, who remains friendly with his former colleague. “But, yes, it was certainly a benefit to us to have seen what was coming.”

US prosecutors had ploughed through more than 16 million documents and from that trove pulled out tens of thousands that purported to show how Lynch and Hussain had, together, “used every accounting trick in the book” to boost Autonomy’s earnings. Having a sense of which documents prosecutors would use and how they would use them provided a critical leg-up.

Even so, Lynch was filled with forboding. “With the low acquittal rate in the US, plus the fact we’d seen all the methods used, we were not hopeful,” he explains. To stay sane, he says, he would, “never watch anything with prisons in it”. He coped by staying laser-focused on the task in front of him — the hour-by-hour proceedings and preparations for trial — and pushing away thoughts about what everyone agreed would be the likely outcome. “I have a saying, ‘First tiger on the path.’ If you’re walking down the path and there’s multiple tigers, there’s no point in worrying about tiger number four. You have to worry about tiger number one.”

But one can only think about tiger avoidance for so long. What did he do when he wasn’t meeting with his lawyers or trawling through documents? “I’ve always played tenor sax, so I took the opportunity of house arrest to move over to the alto.” He watched the Super Bowl with his security detail, with whom he became “great friends”. He adds: “They turned out to be the most wonderful people. I miss them now.”

Lynch had another factor in his favour: the nature of the case. The Department of Justice had to communicate a simple idea — that Lynch was bent — but do so via a plodding, painstaking parade of emails chockful of jargon, financial reports and spreadsheets, where single cells would be the subject of lengthy interrogation. It made for a wildly boring and turgid trial. The jurors often seemed glassy-eyed. One was dismissed because he repeatedly fell asleep. In short, the prosecutors’ tale of financial skulduggery, unspooled in spreadsheet after spreadsheet, didn’t quite land.

That is not to say there weren’t plenty of transactions that raised eyebrows, such as “round trip” contracts in which Autonomy would pay a company for “services” and then swiftly sell that same company software for a similar sum. The allegation was that Autonomy was, in effect, funding its own sales to make its business look more healthy than it was. This was one of countless ruses Lynch oversaw, prosecutors claimed, to inflate sales and then, on his orders, lie to its auditor, to City analysts and to regulators about the true state of the business.

Lynch admitted in court that Autonomy “wasn’t perfect”, but said that he operated above the plane where any misdeeds might have transpired, and that any questionable activity was entirely immaterial in the context of a thriving business that was bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year. He told the court: “There are people that cut corners that shouldn’t have. There are a thousand little realities. A lot of what we’ve been looking at is like peering through the door of a kitchen and seeing the sausage-making machine, and that’s how it really works. If you take the microscope into even the most spotless kitchen you’d find bacteria. If it wasn’t there, that’d be something very abnormal. I don’t think Autonomy was any different.”

His lawyers claimed that Autonomy’s books were approved by outside accountants and that, under British accounting standards, the deals in question were appropriately accounted for. The latter was a key point. Much of the trial was spent deep in the accounting weeds, examining subtle but important transatlantic differences. What might look fishy to an accountant in San Francisco could be totally above board to one in London, Lynch’s lawyers argued, and then produced experts to support that position. There was no fraud, argued Lynch’s team, just a difference of professional standards.

In week ten of the trial, after more than 35 people had taken the stand, there was one final witness: Lynch himself. It was a high-risk play. Few criminal defendants testify in their own defence because it exposes them to direct cross-examination. After weeks of being painted as a pantomime villain, however, the gambit humanised Lynch. And critically, when handed their golden opportunity, prosecutors instead subjected him to hours of perfunctory questions about a handful of transactions.

Lynch’s head lawyer, Brian Heberlig, hammered home this point in his closing argument: “This was the prosecutor’s moment to go right for the jugular with the best evidence he had to prove that Mike Lynch was guilty. What happened? You witnessed it. He reviewed a chronology of documents, with no probing questions.” He added: “It takes an exponential leap, not justified by the evidence, to conclude that Mike committed fraud.”

The jury agreed.

The San Francisco verdict scrambled a narrative that for many had long been settled: Lynch was guilty. Could it really be that he was innocent all along? And if he was, how did a corporate takeover gone bad turn into a decade-long nightmare that nearly destroyed a middle-aged dad’s life? Or was this simply a very American outcome, where a wealthy businessman pays for the best defence money can buy and walks free?

In 2022 the UK High Court judge, having heard 93 days of testimony in a civil trial, including 20 days when Lynch was on the stand, concluded that he and Hussain had committed fraud. Mr Justice Hildyard explained his reasoning in an excruciatingly detailed 1,700-page judgment. It began with the central question: “Fraud on a grand scale; or relentless witch-hunt?” He concluded that it was, indeed, the former. “In my judgment, Dr Lynch shared with Mr Hussain knowledge of the impropriety of the way aspects of Autonomy’s actual business activities had been accounted for and disclosed (or rather disguised, concealed or misleadingly presented),” he wrote. HPE is seeking $4 billion in damages from Lynch personally. The judge has already indicated any penalty would be far smaller.

He plans to appeal, but now the only jeopardy he faces is having to write a rather large cheque. And about that, Lynch, who advises and is an investor in several tech start-ups, is not worried. “My wife has been very good at investing in the things that I’ve told her to from a point of view of technology. We’ve done very well,” he says. “It’s not a perilous situation.” Beyond being his investing proxy, Lynch’s wife, Angela, has stayed assiduously out of the limelight. When approached in the hallways outside the courtroom she silently waved off requests for comment. For this interview at their London home she stayed behind in Suffolk. The first time she heard the particulars of the case, Lynch explains, was in San Francisco. “We made the decision that Angela would not be involved in the case. She stayed completely separate. Her focus was the family and children,” he says.

He points out that much of the High Court case was based on hearsay evidence directly lifted from Hussain’s trial in America, evidence that has now been undermined by Lynch’s lawyers. “So the big question that the lawyers are looking at is, now that we know that evidence wasn’t true, how does that affect the UK trial?”

• I focused on tech, not accounting, says Mike Lynch as he denies Autonomy fraud

In retrospect Lynch says the whole affair is rather easy to explain. Whitman, a politically ambitious tech millionaire, needed to reset after her disastrous run for Republican governor of California (she lost by 14 percentage points). HP, a company in need of a revamp, could have been her springboard. But it was in bad shape, and Autonomy, a deal she did not devise, made for a convenient scapegoat, he argues. “There’s this moment where suddenly they decide to blame [the writedown] on Leo Apotheker and Autonomy management,” rather than the failure to integrate two wildly different businesses and thus extract the billions of dollars of “synergies” that HP had promised its investors.

The snowball had begun to roll down the mountain, even as HP executives questioned whether they could pin the blame on Lynch. Damning internal documents, produced in the court case, show HP’s accountants struggling to justify the $5 billion fraud allegation, claiming that it would require “nonsensical” and “crazy” calculations. After HP went live with its version of events, one employee claimed the accusations were based on “spin and speculation”.

Lynch says: “I would love to say to [Whitman], ‘What were you thinking? Did you really think that that was going to just run?’ ” Is he not furious? “Anger,” he says, “is not fruitful. You just have to get on with dealing with the onslaught.” Whitman, now based in Nairobi as the US ambassador to Kenya, did not return requests for comment.

After 13 years, 16 million documents, three court cases, hundreds of millions of pounds in legal bills and contradictory outcomes, the answer to the question of “who is right?” is an impossible one. What is clear, however, after having spent years monitoring the case, days watching Lynch from across a courtroom and hours more in his sitting room, Faucet the dog nuzzled into his lap, is the sense that Lynch is emerging from something akin to a near-death experience.

“That is very much how I handled it,” he says. “It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?”

Chief among those problems? Death. And the California-based Diamandis is intent on doing something about it.

The founder of the X Prize opened applications last week for one of his organisation’s largest and most ambitious competitions: $111 million (£87 million) for a team or company that develops a single treatment capable of reversing by 20 per cent the effects of ageing on muscles, cognition and the immune function. Requiring all three conditions to be addressed is a high bar.

But Diamandis is convinced that we are on the cusp of a great leap forward in longevity due to a confluence of factors. These include a revolution in the approach to ageing research, a host of advances in animal (but not yet human) trials, and the obsession of a growing number of billionaires who have become laser-focused on living, if not forever, for a very, very long time.

Diamandis’s aim is to push humanity to “escape velocity”, the controversial notion that anti-ageing advances will eventually outpace the natural process of getting older. That we can, collectively, stop the biological clock. “I had kids at age 50, and I want to see them and their great grandchildren. I know the ravages of ageing are coming, so let me do everything I can to die as late as possible.”

To speed this future, he is using the X Prize Foundation, which he set up 30 years ago. The organisation has launched more than 30 competitions, each of them funded by wealthy individuals, groups or companies, and which pay out only if a team actually meets the stated goal. Past prizes range from a $1 million contest aimed at developing apps to help “low literacy” adults learn to read, to a $119 million contest launched this year for breakthroughs in desalination.

The one that put X Prize, and Diamandis, on the map, was its first: the 1994 Ansari X Prize, which offered $10 million to the first private company to make a reusable spaceship. Scaled Composites, a small California firm, won the prize in 2004. Sir Richard Branson bought the company, which formed the basis for his Virgin Galactic space-tourism business and catalysed the private space industry.

Next on Diamandis’s list? An “interspecies two-way communication” prize for anyone who can leverage artificial intelligence to allow humans to speak with animals. He said: “They’re communicating with themselves on a reliable basis. The data is there and large-language models will give us the ability to interpolate between species.”

His immediate goal, however, is not dying. “I need another 100 years of lifespan to enjoy and see the future I want,” he said. Aside from talking to one’s dog, the future he wants includes humans living on Mars and mining asteroids.

Diamandis has honed a unique skill: separating billionaires from their money by matching them with causes they hold dear. “I am railing against the amount of wealth that is… doing nothing. I have a large number of friends who have tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars, and the money is sitting in the bank account earning more money, or being used to buy yachts and homes. Why isn’t this capital being deployed to make a dent in the universe?”

To wit, when Elon Musk saw his net worth surge in 2021 to make him the world’s wealthiest man, Diamandis texted him about funding a prize for the removal of carbon dioxide from the air or sea. “He was getting a lot of flak for not being philanthropic, so I said, ‘How about another prize?’ ” Diamandis explained. “He texted back, ‘Sure’.” Musk put up the entire $100 million for the prize, plus $20 million to run the competition. Since the launch of the competition, a field of 6,000 applicants has been whittled down to 300 finalists. A winner will be chosen next year.

The funding for the longevity prize was led by Hevolution, Saudi Arabia’s ambitious anti-ageing initiative, along with billionaires such as Christian Angermayer, the London-based longevity and psychedelics investor, and Chip Wilson, founder of the Lululemon apparel empire.

James Peyer, chief executive of Cambrian Bio, which incubates and funds longevity drugs, said: “What the X Prize has done historically, and what it is doing here, is bringing lots of serious attention to the space.”

The question is whether it will truly move the needle. In the past five years, investors have poured billions of dollars into longevity start-ups amid a scientific shift in which ageing has come to be seen not as an inevitability but rather an ailment that can be treated. The resulting rise of “geroscience” as a respected discipline, combined with promising results for a number of potential anti-ageing treatments in animals, has opened the floodgates — specially among tech billionaires such as Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who have put swathes of their personal wealth into this new generation of start-ups.

Peyer, who said his company will “probably” enter the competition, does not expect it to unleash a new wave of researchers, but instead to motivate those already working on one aspect of ageing to raise their sights to a treatment that addresses all three of the targets laid out in the prize.

He said: “Companies that are already going to be successful in this broader ageing space will see this as an opportunity to run an extra trial to see if they can win the prize.”

“Tired of fog? Try the frogs!” ran the caption, picturing said green amphibian, complete with tricolore collar and tie, perched in front of the La Défense business district.

The billboards plastered around Heathrow and the Eurostar terminals aimed to roll out “the blue, white and red carpet for thousands of professionals now seeking new European headquarters”, according to the organisers.

Now France’s political instability means the boot is on the other foot, potentially a boon for UK tech.

Just like the jitters in the French stock market, the deadlock caused by the recent indecisive election is worrying people in the country’s vibrant tech scene, concerned about the impact the continuing uncertainty could have on foreign investment.

After a decade of being cosseted by government money and policy support, the sector is also weighing up the hit from likely tax rises introduced by a left-wing coalition, or immigration restrictions from the right.

“This instability may endanger what we have achieved, the ecosystem that has been built and our capacity at attracting talent,” Alexandre Labarriere from the France Digitale group of start-ups said, adding that businesses had been contacting the organisation asking what was going to happen.

• Investors flee Paris for London amid fears of political upheaval

Paris, the city of gastronomy, of fashion, of writers, of painters, of lovers, has to its own surprise, and that of many others, reclaimed the word entrepreneur over the past decade and is now talked about as the city of artificial intelligence.

It has sloughed off the stereotype of the heavily unionised business environment bound in red tape, with staff who value their two-hour lunch breaks, in favour of a start-up scene. The 9th arrondissement, the red-light district just north of the Louvre, is a tech hub sometimes referred to as “Silicon IX”.

One American investor who chose London as a European base told me recently he thought the firm had missed a trick not plumping for France, because of its strength in AI.

This is exemplified by Mistral, the French generative AI business, founded last year. Often feverishly described as France’s answer to OpenAI, led by Arthur Mensch, 31, known as France’s answer to Sam Altman (of course), it is valued at $6 billion and has raised $1.2 billion in a year.

Others have punched through too. There is Hugging Face, valued at $4.5 billion, which creates and shares advanced machine learning models; Kyutai, a non-profit funded with €300 million of private money, which released a free voice chatbot last week to wide acclaim; and the H Company, which recently raised $220 million to develop new AI models.

• How the next government can super-charge the UK technology sector

All this success is not happenstance. The tech sector has fed off France’s strong education system, business and engineering schools. Like Rishi Sunak in the UK, Emmanuel Macron, a former banker, as economy minister and latterly as president, has championed tech and myriad initiatives that have laid the foundations for the ecosystem.

In 2021 the France 2030 plan put €30 billion into areas including robotics, semiconductors, electric vehicles and renewable energy. Other pro-tech policies have included tax breaks for start-ups, a €5 billion programme for the top 120 French tech businesses and a special visa.

France’s capital is also home to Station F — a former train station that lays claim to be the world’s largest start-up accelerator, funded by Xavier Niel, the telecoms billionaire and co-owner of Le Monde. Vivatech, the Paris tech conference, has become a must-go event, including for Elon Musk, who appeared again this year.

Granted, Macron stays in power — but with no majority in the national assembly the future of La French Tech starts to look a little shaky. Bruno Le Maire, France’s economic minister, has warned that an immediate risk for the country is “financial crisis and economic decline”.

In contrast, in this tale of two rival tech cities, neighbouring London with its flourishing AI scene could benefit from the solidity and stability in Westminster.

For any self-styled “frogs” making the short hop across the Channel, the fog might be unpredictable, but at least you know what you’re getting from the economic climate.

My neighbour had posted a cheque to British Gas on June 13 for full payment of the amount due and received a letter back saying the date was wrong on it, so she sent another one on June 26 by post. On July 9 she received the threatening letter, which is dated July 4.

At 94, my neighbour does not use the internet and she is very deaf so cannot use the phone to explain complex situations. She was going to write another cheque on the assumption that the second cheque also had something wrong with it. I decided to try and help and phoned the British Gas number on the letter while I was with her. On getting through I had to explain everything to my neighbour in a very loud voice so she could hear me and confirm I had her authority to deal directly with British Gas on her behalf.

I quickly discovered that British Gas had indeed processed her second cheque. It received payment in full on July 2 — a full two days before it sent the threatening letter.

I explained the negative effect the letter was having on my neighbour and that I could not understand how British Gas’s systems allowed the threatening letter to be sent. The reasons I was given were anything but reassuring, so I requested that an official complaint be raised on her behalf. I was told I would receive a call on the number I was phoning from, my mobile, within three working days to discuss the case. I haven’t received a call and it’s now nearly the end of July.

Are you able to do something that will make British Gas management sit up and urgently change the company’s processes so this threatening behaviour to our non-internet-using elderly generation is stopped?

Another reader writes I’m writing to ask if you can help to resolve a long-running issue I have with British Gas.

The problem is that British Gas has the wrong serial number for the energy meter on my account. The consequence of this is that I’m being billed for someone else’s energy use, not mine. So far, this has cost me £109.74, which I have paid under threat of debt collection. I’m now in receipt of a further bill for £821.78 (with payment due by July 1, 2024) that is not mine and fully expect the threat of debt collection to be repeated.

The problem started a year ago, when I bought a newly completed barn conversion in June 2023. I knew at that time the energy supplier was British Gas. For a long time, there was no contact from British Gas until the first bill arrived in April 2024 showing the wrong serial number for the installed energy meter. I have a meter reading taken on the day I moved into the property and have taken readings at the end of each month since then.

Over several weeks, I have made repeated attempts (by phone, email and web chat) to get British Gas to correct the meter serial number on my account, all without success. I have also provided several photographs of my energy meter to British Gas but still the issue persists.

• Should I switch to a fixed energy deal?

Jill repliesI am getting a lot of complaints about British Gas and in several cases it has been quick to send threatening letters about debt collectors. In both the cases above it was clear the readers were aware of a problem and were trying to correct it — in the case of the second reader, repeatedly — so it was completely unnecessary to issue such warnings.

The first reader was lucky to have such a good friend and neighbour who could sort out this mess on her behalf. He set up a direct debit to ensure her energy bills would be paid on time in future. I contacted British Gas and asked for the customer to be put on the priority services register so any further problems could be resolved more easily and sympathetically.

British Gas said it would write to the customer to apologise for causing her distress and that it was adding a £50 goodwill credit on her account “in recognition of the above, but also that we appreciate she is a longstanding customer and we do very much value her”.

British Gas’s incompetence in sorting out the second problem has cost it a year’s worth of electricity. It told me that the reader’s problem started when the developer who converted the barn registered an incorrect meter serial number against the reader’s new-build property on the national database. British Gas then exacerbated the problem by failing to send the reader any bills for nine months. When it finally did send a bill to the property in April 2024 for £109.74, it was addressed to “the occupier”, even though British Gas admits the reader informed it he had moved in during June 2023.

It has finally arranged for the industry database of meters to be updated with the correct details. The recent bill for £821.78 has been cancelled and it has adjusted the reader’s account so that he starts being billed from June 27 this year. British Gas has wiped out a whole year’s worth of electricity bills, worth £827.

The reader thought this was generous and more than he expected, but said: “I still think British Gas could have done more sooner to resolve my complaint, so it won’t surprise you to learn that I’m considering switching my energy supplier.”

My pension shrank by £15k and Phoenix won’t tell me why

I started a pension with Britannic Assurance in approximately 1985. After various takeovers and mergers, it is now administered by Phoenix Life. As I have now retired, with advice from an independent financial adviser, I decided to move this pension into one that facilitated drawdown.

Phoenix told me on January 10, the day I requested the transfer, that the pension was valued at £185,766. Six weeks later (the transfer was expected to take two weeks) on February 23 it informed me that the value was £170,052. During this time markets and pension funds increased by about 4 per cent.

I have asked Phoenix for an explanation of why my fund had been devalued along with its calculations. It has repeatedly ignored this request. As my financial adviser said in an email to me: “I do find it incredible that Phoenix has not been able to construct a technical response to quite basic questions over the last six months.”

Phoenix has been very difficult to contact; many of the numbers it sends me are either discontinued or never answered. At no time during any communications has it complied with its stated time pledges, whether it be acknowledgment of letters, complaint responses or telephone calls.

Phoenix has sent further valuations, but these come from a different department, which gives options for receiving the pension along with the suggestion of consulting an independent adviser. This I had already done nearly a year ago, as Phoenix knows from his subsequent communications with the company and the form he completed.

As far as I know, the transfer value is still £170,052. At least that is the sum the new platform at Aviva is expecting to receive.

I am now 75 years old and have contacted the Financial Ombudsman, but it tells me that its investigations won’t commence for another two months. In the meantime, my pension pot is with Phoenix as cash. I am getting really troubled by this delay as, at my age, I need to get my financial affairs in order.

• What is an annuity and should I get one?

Jill repliesPhoenix told me you have a deferred annuity pension contract designed to provide a guaranteed minimum annuity on a set date. As such, it does not have a fund value, but because you had arranged to draw your pension many years after the original pension maturity date, the guaranteed minimum annuity had increased from £2,000 to £13,748 a year. As you wanted to transfer your pension to Aviva, Phoenix had to calculate how much the annuity — worth £13,748 a year — would have cost to provide, even though you prefer the idea of pension drawdown.

The cost of providing an annuity can be impacted by fluctuating interest rates — the higher the interest rate, the lower the fund value, and vice versa. However, the Bank of England base rate was 5.25 per cent in January and stayed at that level until last month, when it dropped by 0.25 per cent, so it clearly wasn’t fluctuating interest rates that were causing your problem.

Phoenix told me the value of £185,766 you were given in January was incorrect and inflated, for which it apologised. It had not been aware of the initial error, and it admitted that its responses to further queries were not “as timely as they should have been”.

Phoenix is still investigating how the original error happened and is awaiting information from Aviva to enable it to make good any shortfall you have suffered as a result of the delay. But it has now transferred £184,000 to Aviva on your behalf and is paying you £1,300 in compensation — not far short of the figure it told you that you were due back in January.

Can we help you?

Email questionofmoney@sunday-times.co.uk or write to Question of Money, The Sunday Times, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF. Please send only copies of original documents. Letters should be exclusive to The Sunday Times. Advice is offered without legal responsibility and we regret that we cannot reply to everyone who contacts us.

In a sign of how tepid demand is, especially for older and less eco-friendly blocks, buyers of offices this year have on average paid 18 per cent less than the asking price, data from CoStar, the property analytics group, shows.

Not since 2009, when the global property market was in meltdown, has the shortfall been so high.

There was a time, when the office market was in its pomp about ten years ago, that buyers would pay over the asking price. As recently as 2019, landlords were more often than not at least getting the price they asked for.

140 Leadenhall Street, a nine-storey office in the shadow of the Cheesegrater building in the City of London, was put up for sale for about £30 million but is thought to have sold in June for closer to £20 million.

Oxfam House in Oxford, the charity’s British headquarters, sold for £37.1 million in the spring, having come to market with a reported asking price of £60 million. In Leeds, 6-7 Park Row was on the market for two years before selling for just over £8 million last month, having had an initial asking price of about £20 million.

The office market has been slow for a couple of years, as rapid interest rate rises have both pushed up the cost of financing and dragged valuations lower. There also remains uncertainty as to the future of the office in the post-pandemic world of hybrid working.

Although demand from businesses for “best-in-class” offices — modern green buildings with state-of-the-art amenities and ample leisure space — is getting stronger, finding tenants for so-called secondary offices is getting ever harder.

CoStar estimates that 8.3 per cent of all office space in the UK is empty — the most for 11 years — with the majority of that in older buildings on the outskirts of towns and cities.

Agents think some landlords are prepared to let their buildings go on the cheap because they cannot afford the refurbishment needed to bring those offices up to the standard that tenants are increasingly demanding.

Similarly, opportunistic buyers looking to improve, or “flip”, secondary offices need to drive a hard bargain to make the numbers stack up for their refurbishment projects, especially if they are outside London.

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The cost of financing has fallen back and valuations are stabilising, but it remains a slow market and even “grade A” offices are proving tough to sell.

Derwent, the London office owner, marketed a building on Whitfield Street, near Euston, for £120 million this year but that sale has since been pulled. Paul Williams, chief executive at Derwent, said the offers made were “reasonable” but were not as high as he had been looking for.

“[The market] has been subdued — obviously the cost of debt has been quite high,” he said. “It was good to see the first cut [to interest rates] last week and it looks like more cuts are coming. We’re seeing a few more assets put on to the market.”

The offer values Britain’s biggest investment platform at 1,140p per share and is more than 15 per cent higher than the 985p per share offer made in April, which was dismissed by the Hargreaves Lansdown board as significantly undervaluing the company.

The company’s share price jumped more than 2 per cent during early trading on Friday to about 1,102p a share. The stock price is up more than 50 per cent since the April bid, but is down 54 per cent from its May 2019 peak.

• Hargreaves Lansdown agrees £5.4 billion takeover

The takeover by the consortium, which also includes Nordic Capital and Platinum Ivy (owned by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund), means the company will become privately owned for the first time since it was listed in 2007.

This will have huge implications for its customers and investors. We answer your questions.

The deal is still subject to final shareholder and regulatory approval. Details will be sent to shareholders next month and they will then be able to vote. There must be a 75 per cent majority for the deal to get the final go-ahead. It is widely expected to be approved.

If approved, shareholders will be able to transfer their stake to the new unlisted company or accept cash in exchange for their shares. Those wanting to sell their holding will get 1,110p per share in cash, plus a dividend of 30p per share, taking the total to 1,140p per share.

Those who wish to retain their stake will be subject to an overall cap of 35 per cent ownership.

Jason Hollands from the wealth manager Evelyn said: “Most investors will receive cash if the offer is made and approved. The option to continue holding shares is almost certainly aimed at the founders and large institutional shareholders, not retail investors.”

Being listed on the stock market means that Hargreaves Lansdown shares are easily traded at present.

When the company goes into private hands, which is likely to happen in the first three months of 2025, you will no longer be able to trade in the same way. Instead, if you want to offload shares you will have to find a buyer or wait until the new owners decide to sell or list the company on a stock exchange again.

Unlisted firms can also be difficult to value so you may not know what your holding is worth until someone agrees to buy your stake from you.

You are free to sell your shares any time before the completion of the takeover. If the share is trading above the 1,140p offer price at the point at which the takeover completes and you wish to leave, you will receive only that amount per share.

It is unlikely there will be any changes to your service. Any new owner is unlikely to make any significant changes, at least in the early stages after a takeover.

You should be able to continue to access your account and trade without any loss of service, regardless of who owns the business.

Regardless of ownership, the company will continue to be regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, the regulator. This means you will be able to take any complaints to the free-to-use Financial Ombudsman Service. You will also continue to have protection under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which covers up to £85,000 held in a firm that fails.

No. Unlisted assets can’t be held in an Isa. If you invest in Hargreaves Lansdown shares through an Isa, these shares would need to be transferred to a general trading account instead. Here you are liable for tax on any gains you make or dividends you receive. If you decide to take cash in exchange for your shares, you can keep your money in an Isa.

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Unlisted shares can be held within a pension.

However, you may face difficulties selling your stake when you want to convert the money into cash. The difficulty of valuing an unlisted asset can also cause problems when determining your tax liability.

Because Hargreaves Lansdown is one of the biggest companies listed on the UK stock market, it is held by many UK-focused investment funds. Some may have to change their exposure to the company following the takeover.

Funds will have different approaches to holding unlisted shares.

Funds structured as open-ended investment companies, which is most funds, are allowed to invest up to 10 per cent of their assets in unlisted firms. This is to ensure the fund manager can easily sell shares to pay investors if there is a rush for the exit. If managers hold too much in unlisted companies, they may struggle to sell assets quickly enough.

Investment trust managers do not have the same restrictions on investing in unlisted assets.Those who invest in investment trusts can also sell their shares without having to wait for the manager to sell assets. This is because investment trusts are structured as listed shares so can be traded like any other stock.

One of the biggest investors in Hargreaves Lansdown is the fund manager Lindsell Train. It owns £128 million of Hargreaves Lansdown shares in its UK Equity fund, according to the latest accounts.

Hargreaves Lansdown also makes up about 3.8 per cent of the £1,592 million Lindsell Train Finsbury Growth & Income investment trust, or about £60 million.

Lindsell Train has been approached for comment.

What is certain is that the government is preparing to change the balance of power between employers and employees in a way that has not been done before in modern Britain. Since the 1970s, employers have been given a grace period to hire new recruits without the risk of facing unfair dismissal claims if the person doesn’t work out. The grace period variously has been six months of service, one year and, since 2012, after two years. But never from day one.

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The reform is the most significant change within the government’s New Deal package of employment law reforms, first promised in 2021 and which it has said will be presented to parliament by mid-October. Employers and their advisers are particularly concerned about the impact of the right to claim unfair dismissal from the first day in a job.

Cleanology employs 1,300 people and voluntarily has paid its cleaners the London-weighted “real living wage” since 2022, at present £13.15 an hour. Ponniah, who turns 45 this month, says the new right bumps up against the reality of employing people. Some don’t do what they say and employers need to act quickly where a new hire doesn’t work out, without getting tied up with multiple formal performance reviews, common after two years of service but not for those still working their probation. If that consultative process is not followed to the letter, the employer loses any related employment tribunal.

“For employers like us, it’s a bit of a kick in the teeth. We are trying to do the right thing. What are we supposed to do [when faced by new hires who repeatedly don’t turn up for work]? Do we wait a week and then have a disciplinary hearing that they might not turn up to, while paying someone else to do the work?”

Lisa Kay, the founder of Sole Bliss, a footwear brand, is also mulling over the changes. Her business is expanding rapidly and hopes to double its 18-strong team in the next year. A two-year risk-free period has allowed Sole Bliss to give people time to show they share the company’s values and work ethic and to fit in with the rest of the team. “In the past we have given people a chance where we were not 100 per cent.”

When day one unfair dismissal rights come in, Kay, 60, expects Sole Bliss to “take longer at interviews”, exploring unexplained gaps in CVs and double-checking references. She says it may also extend workers’ probation periods from three to six months. “You can never tell about the capability of someone or their conduct from day one.”

Ponniah already operates a six-month probation period, although most staff clear the hurdle after a third performance review at 12 weeks because they are good at their jobs. Nevertheless, he will need to make changes. “It will definitely make a difference to the way we recruit. Where we are not sure about someone, we might have said, ‘Let’s give them a go.’ Now if we have any doubts we will not. We have to be more cautious.”

Labour’s reforms include scrapping zero-hours contracts, increasing pay reporting at large companies, toughening existing duties to prevent sexual harassment at work and introducing day one rights to statutory sick pay and to maternity and paternity pay.

On its plans for day one unfair dismissal rights, it promises to find a way to accommodate probationary periods that have “fair and transparent rules and processes” so that employers can “assess new hires”. “The changes will help to ensure that newly hired workers are not fired without reason or cause and will help drive up standards in workplaces,” it has said.

Taken together, the reforms are significant. “This is absolutely the biggest change in UK employment law since the Labour government signed up to the social chapter in the late 1990s,” in the view of Tom Bray, an employment law partner at Eversheds Sutherland, the legal firm.

This month the TUC published research commissioned from the University of Cambridge that highlighted how British employment laws remain “significantly weaker” than those in other big economies such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain, although they are stronger than those in the United States.

Robert McKellar, legal services director at Peninsula, an HR and employment law specialist, offers a counter-argument: “Employees aren’t exactly short on rights as it stands. There are 88 different employment rights across 80 pieces of employment law that employees benefit from including, from day one, rights in matters such as equalities and the national living wage.”

Willmott says that while the CIPD supports a cut in the qualifying period for unfair dismissal, “there is a big difference between reducing the qualifying period and removing it completely. Employers might be less likely to take on young workers who might take longer to get up to speed, if there is less flexibility.” Small and medium-sized companies are likely to be hit hardest. Some do not use employment contracts at all, relying on verbal agreements and leaving them exposed to claims.

“HR and people management is the Achilles’ heel for most smaller companies. That really needs to be understood by policy makers. The removal of that two-year qualifying period will be a significant disruption.”

To bring in day one unfair dismissal rights, the rules around probation periods are likely to change. If the right disapplied during probation periods, there is a risk that some employers may extend them to two years. To counter that, the government could cap probation periods, for the first time.

Large employers have spent the summer trying to find out if they will need to revise their employment contracts, lawyers say. Contracts determine rights to notice in the event of dismissal during probationary periods.

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Bray says it is not clear what a “fair and transparent rule and process is. For example, will employers be able to determine the length of their probationary period or will that be set by the law? Will employers be able to extend probation in any circumstances? And during a probationary period, will employers be able to dismiss without following any procedure, or will there be some light-touch procedure?”

Compensation awards by tribunals for those in work for only a short time also need to be clarified. At present, the compensation is capped at one year’s salary or £115,000, whichever is lower.

Another factor is that the employment tribunal system will face more claims. It is already struggling. “The system is significantly backlogged. We are still seeing cases being brought in 2024 being listed for 2026 for hearings,” says McKellar. “It means that both the employer and the employee have an incredibly stressful situation hanging over them.” To move on more quickly, many employers settle even vexatious cases. McKellar says it happens in 75 per cent of the cases that Peninsula sees.

What happens next? The government has promised to consult and canvass views. “It is crucial we get the balance right,” the Department for Business and Trade said, “which is why employers will still be able to use probation periods to assess new staff and we will consult fully with business before new laws come into effect.”

Willmott wants ministers to play the long game. “It is important that there is a period of reflection to understand what would be the best approach that would prompt employers to improve their employment practices and not have negative unintended consequences that could adversely affect businesses and workers.”