The tragic accident of Mike Lynch

I met tech tycoon Mike Lynch twice, once about ten years ago and again this year, shortly after he returned from being acquitted in a fraud trial in California. The first time, I accompanied him as a speaker at a corporate conference, at the National Football Centre in Burton-on-Trent, of all places. He was the star of the show and we barely nodded. Back then – after he had sold his software company Autonomy to US company Hewlett Packard for $11 billion, but before his career was overshadowed by HP's allegations that Autonomy's accounts were fraudulent – he had a reputation for arrogance in the business world, which did not help him mobilise support against the extradition proceedings that eventually landed him in a San Francisco court.

But on the second meeting – a private party in London – he was humbled, talkative and instantly likeable. I had hoped to get to know him better, but now I never will.

He is the lost leader of British tech who could have achieved so much more as an innovator and venture capitalist. The least I can do in his memory is to continue to point out the scandalous one-sidedness of the 2003 US-UK extradition agreement, which threw a number of British corporate defendants into the merciless clutches of the US justice system – and, bizarrely, since the fatal yacht trip was planned as a celebration of his court victory, brought about Lynch's tragic end.

What is Revolut worth?

Is Revolut really worth £35 billion? Revolut was founded in 2015 by London-based Russians Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko as a low-cost foreign exchange app. The company is still private and only received its full UK banking license a month ago, which it first applied for in 2021. But it already serves nine million UK customers – despite some accounting issues along the way and a relatively high number of online fraud cases that led to 3,458 rulings from the Financial Ombudsman Service last year, compared to 2,332 at the much larger bank Lloyds.

It has also built political connections, sponsoring events at both major parties' conferences over the past year but most prominently flying its banner at the Labour Party's inaugural reception. Indeed, sceptics are wondering whether the Prudential Regulation Authority's delay in granting it a banking license might have something to do with the hope of persuading Revolut to buck the trend and list its shares in London rather than on New York's Nasdaq stock exchange. We're told City minister Tulip Siddiq plans to meet with Revolut in the autumn, although Storonsky explained last year that “London is much less liquid, so I just don't see the point in it.”

Arsonist

Regular readers will know that I have a certain tribal loyalty to Barclays, or at least to the version of Barclays from the last century, where my father spent his working life and I idled away for ten years before turning to journalism. So I was particularly offended by a video of Chris Packham – I should probably introduce him as “nature reporter”, but I have only a vague idea of ​​who he is – telling a crowd: “If anyone here banks at Barclays, I suggest you put your head in a bucket of petrol and set it on fire.”

The nominal price of £35 billion that makes Revolut Europe's most valuable digital start-up stems from the terms of its $500 million share sale to institutional investors earlier this month – and makes Revolut worth more than NatWest and on par with Lloyds and Barclays. If that sounds absurd, consider that Elon Musk's electric car company Tesla is worth more than all of its major rivals combined: that's just how passionate tech investors see the future of the world.

I assume he was expressing his feelings about the bank's alleged funding of fossil fuel projects and weapons production. But what a disgusting statement to make in these literally explosive times. I hope this will bring an influx of new customers to the bank who will realize that oil and weapons will unfortunately remain essential until clean energy and world peace prevail.

I remember the student fad 50 years ago when they boycotted Barclays and occasionally set fire to its branches to protest its presence in apartheid South Africa. The counter-argument that it was more helpful to stay engaged and push for change (which you could argue just as well for loans to oil companies) was drowned out by calls for a complete exit until the bank's board decided to sell all its South African holdings at a loss in 1986 – only to be greeted a decade later by Nelson Mandela with the words: “You should never have sold.”

Bitter end

A quick return to England in the middle of my holiday in France dispels the cheerful mood of last week's column. Firstly, the train drivers' union Aslef – which has just bagged an unconditional 15 per cent pay rise over three years – has announced 22 days of strike action in a separate industrial dispute on the North-East Main Line, which I have to drive on every week. Having written last month that “no one should wish failure on a new Chancellor of the Exchequer”, I am already revising that opinion. Have Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer decided to crash the economy as quickly as possible while they can still blame everything on the Tories, in a desperate attempt to fend off the tidal wave of public sector pay demands that would otherwise derail the new government's plans?

And as if that wasn't enough to send me into autumnal gloom, here's the news that Angela Rayner's Workers' Protection Bill, due out in October, “could mean the end of the office party”. Which, even with The viewer? This is really the bitter end – and we have no choice but to return to France for one last time of sunshine and gastronomy, even if Ryanair warns: “Due to a shortage of security staff at London Stansted Airport, we advise all passengers to arrive at the airport three hours before departure.” Next week, we'll have French restaurant tips to cheer us all up.