Sir David Davis has said Mike Lynch should never have been extradited to the US, as he vows to change the treaty in memory of the businessman.
The Conservative MP also said he believed the treaty had ‘serious consequences for the economy.’
Speaking on GB News David Davis said: “The Labour government under Tony Blair, shortly after 9/11 in 2003, introduced an agreement, a treaty, with the American government to accelerate extraditions, supposedly in both directions, and supposedly for terrorist offences.
“That was a perfectly common-sense thing to do. But what's happened in the subsequent 20 years or so has been that it's been used by the American Justice Department for all sorts of non violent commercial offences, if you like.
“And Mike Lynch, who died earlier this week in a tragic accident, had been caught up in this.
“He'd sold his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett Packard, for I think about £11 billion. It was sold on the stock exchange, it wasn't the sort of private deal.
“And shortly afterwards, Autonomy decided they didn't like the price they paid for it, and they accused him of fraud. It was a bogus accusation but he spent the last 10 years first trying to resist that accusation and then trying to resist extradition to the United States, unsuccessfully.
“It sort of paralyzed in many ways, much of his business life. This is probably our best businessman, the man who has created more value in our economy than anybody else, and indeed, any number of other people put together.
“A fantastic software scientist, a fantastic entrepreneur, and he was basically stuck trying to defend his freedom.
“British law takes international treaties very seriously. It makes them superior to most other law. And so when someone like Lynch comes along, instead of being tried here in the UK, after all the company was a UK company. It was built up in the UK. It was sold in the UK. It was bought by a European offshoot of Hewlett Packard.
“Instead of being tried here properly, they did it in the States, and they insisted on it. And it's not the first time this has happened any number of times. You might remember the NatWest five, you might remember somebody called Mike Tapper: a whole series of people, and it's one sided.
“And that one-sidedness also reflects that it is unjust. It should never have been the case that Mike Lynch went to America to defend himself for basically 12 months in a trial, which would have ended up with him serving 25 years in prison if the American justice system won.
“Now I don't want to scrap all extraditions. What I want to do is to say, let's just reduce this to what it was first intended for, which is violent terrorist offences, not commercial offences.
“If somebody plots something against the United States in the UK, then fair enough, we should extradite them. But if somebody simply engaged in normal business, then we shouldn't allow American law to apply in Britain. We're not a colony, after all.
“There's an implicit agreement in this that they wouldn't exercise the death penalty. And we've seen this with actual terrorist suspects in the past.
“It's very unfair, very uneven and it has really, really serious consequences for individuals and also really serious consequences for the economy. “Why would you launch your tech company on the London Stock Exchange if you're going to have to, when you eventually sell it, probably to some big American tech company, under American law? Why would you do that?
“Why not just put it in New York in the first place? So that's going to do harm too. I talked all these things through with Mike. We were going to run a campaign together on this, amongst others. Now he's died, I'm going to do it, as it were, in his memory.”
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