SAN FRANCISCO — Hewlett-Packard (HP) said on Tuesday that it took an $8.8bn charge for the "wilful effort to mislead investors and potential buyers" at Autonomy, the software company it agreed to purchase last year for $10.3bn.HP said it was disappointed when it discovered that some former members of Autonomy’s management team "used accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company, prior to Autonomy’s acquisition by HP".More than $5bn of the total charge was because of accounting practices, which a senior executive at Autonomy disclosed after founder Mike Lynch departed, HP said. Autonomy’s UK spokesman George Lockett did not have an immediate comment.Former HP CEO Leo Apotheker agreed to buy Autonomy, the second-largest UK software manufacturer, to expand in cloud-computing and add software that searches a broad range of data, including e-mails, music, videos and posts on social networks.The shares of Pa...
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