US authorities are probing allegations by Hewlett-Packard that a British software firm it bought out had fraudulent accounts, the US tech giant said in its annual report released on December 27. On November 20, HP reported a writedown of $8.8 billion, including more than five billion dollars it attributed to inflated data from Autonomy, acquired by HP in 2011 for more than $10 billion.

The Californian demanded US and British authorities investigate Autonomy, saying "accounting improprieties" before the acquisition led to an "overvalued" acquisition price, which forced HP to take the huge writedown in value.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2012