By Robert McMillan 

Hewlett-Packard Co. said Autonomy Corp. improperly reported $709 million in revenue over 2 1/2 years before H-P bought the British software maker for $11 billion in 2011, as it fleshed out fraud allegations against former Autonomy executives.

H-P sued Autonomy's former Chief Executive Michael Lynch and former Chief Financial Officer Sushovan Hussain on March 30, seeking approximately $5.1 billion in damages.

In Tuesday's court filing, H-P said Autonomy sought to boost revenue--and ultimately its market valuation--through improper practices: reselling computers made by other companies at a loss, engaging in suspicious software-licensing deals with partners, and restructuring data-hosting deals so that they generated more revenue upfront.

Autonomy reported nearly $2.1 billion in revenue from 2009 through the first half of 2011, the period over which H-P said it improperly booked more than $700 million. The biggest chunk, roughly $318 million, included deals where Autonomy sold its products through resellers or hosted other companies' data on its computers.

In the filing, H-P said Mr. Lynch gave the go-ahead to start selling "pure hardware at a loss," in late 2009, pushing sales executives to boost their numbers. H-P said Mr. Lynch offered one executive, Michael Sullivan, a Porsche if he could resell $10 million worth of hardware that quarter. The filing doesn't say whether Mr. Sullivan got the car.

The allegations shed new light into H-P's long-running dispute with Mr. Lynch, whom H-P fired in 2012, just seven months after buying his company.

The Autonomy acquisition was engineered by H-P's former CEO Leo Apotheker, but ultimately inherited by the company's current boss, Meg Whitman, who voted in favor of the deal while she was a member of H-P's board.

In a telephone interview Tuesday, Mr. Lynch said that after three years of alleging impropriety in the acquisition, H-P hasn't produced a smoking gun. "What they are raising are accounting disputes," he said. According to Mr. Lynch, Ms. Whitman and her team misunderstood the way Autonomy was booking its revenue.

In an email sent via his publicist, Mr. Hussain said that even using H-P's accounting, the deals still delivered cash flow to Autonomy. "When you remove the revenue in the way H-P has, you are left with a cash surplus of over $450 million, with no explanation," he said. "I think that says it all."

H-P bought Autonomy with an eye toward making its data-analysis software a signature product as it reinvented itself as a high-margin software company. Instead, the deal became emblematic of H-P's dysfunction.

It wasn't clear from Tuesday's filing how H-P missed the red flags about Autonomy's practices during its review of the potential acquisition.

H-P declined to answer questions about the court filing.

In a statement, the company said that Messrs. Lynch and Hussain presented Autonomy as "a rapidly growing pure software company whose performance was consistently in line with market expectations," while in reality the company "was experiencing little or no growth, it was losing market share, and its true financial performance consistently fell far short of market expectations."

H-P took an $8.8 billion write-down just a year after buying Autonomy. In January, the U.K's Serious Fraud Office said it had closed a nearly two-year probe into Autonomy, after determining that there was no "realistic prospect of conviction."

H-P also referred the case to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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