Hewlett Packard Enterprise has abandoned its legal effort to pursue a share of the roughly £500 million estate of the late software tycoon Mike Lynch, who died last August when the superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily. The move brings an end, at least for now, to one of the most protracted and bitter corporate disputes in recent British business history, which centred on HP's long-running claim that it was defrauded when it bought Lynch's company Autonomy in 2011. The climbdown removes a major legal threat hanging over Lynch's widow and family as they deal with the aftermath of the yacht disaster, in which Lynch and several others, including his daughter, died.

The dispute dated back more than a decade, after HP wrote down Autonomy's value by billions of dollars within a year of the £8.6billion takeover and accused Lynch of inflating the company's accounts before the sale. Lynch always denied wrongdoing and had been cleared of criminal fraud charges in a US court shortly before his death, though HP had continued to pursue a separate civil damages claim against his estate in the UK. With HP now stepping back from targeting the estate, the family's inheritance, built largely from the Autonomy sale proceeds, appears set to pass on without the looming threat of a huge civil payout.