In some parts of the City of London, a sense of disbelief greeted the news last year that Hewlett-Packardhad agreed to pay $11bn for Autonomy, a British software company that had traded for half that value barely six months before.
“This deal defies logic,” wrote Paul Morland, analyst at Peel Hunt, a UK brokerage. “We believe HP shareholders should be worried.”
Quite how much they should have worried has now been revealed. HP yesterday wrote down the value of its software business by $8.8bn, with more than $5bn of that due to alleged “serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations” at Autonomy before the company was acquired.
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