British tech tycoon Lawrence Jones guilty of rape and sexual assault

Technology entrepreneur Lawrence Jones has been found guilty of raping two women in the early 1990s and of sexually assaulting a third woman a decade ago while she worked at UKFast, the web-hosting business he founded. 

The 55-year-old was on Thursday unanimously convicted of raping the two women in Manchester 30 years ago. He was convicted of the sexual assault in January but that majority verdict could not be reported until now because of a reporting restriction.

Jones, once dubbed Britain’s “cloud computing king”, was considered one of the most influential technology magnates in the UK with an estimated wealth of about £700mn.

But his business empire began to crumble in 2019 after the Financial Times published an investigation into his workplace conduct and treatment of female employees, prompting him to quit the company he founded 20 years earlier.

The two women Jones raped in the 1990s, who do not know each other, said in court that Jones attacked them in his flat on separate occasions after he gave them a substance that left them stupefied and unable to fight him off. 

They both knew Jones socially through his work at the time as a pianist at local hotels and pubs across Manchester before his business career took off, the November trial in Manchester Crown Court heard.

Jones, who later gained a prominent public profile as a self-styled straight-talking business guru, claimed he had never met one of the women and said he had a consensual sexual relationship with the second.

In a separate trial in January Jones was found guilty of sexually assaulting a third woman — a former employee at UKFast — while she accompanied him on a business trip to London a decade ago.

Jones has been held in custody since the January conviction.

The father-of-four was acquitted of sexually assaulting and raping a fourth woman, another former UKFast employee, at the January trial.

The outcome of the January trial could not be reported until the second trial concluded this month to avoid prejudicing the jury. Jones’s sentencing on all three convictions will take place in a week. 

Jurors in the November trial heard harrowing details of the rapes Jones committed. 

One of the women said she had known Jones in the 1990s because he dated one of her friends at the time.

She told the court she considered Jones obnoxious after he made an inappropriate sexual remark about her love life the first time they met, telling her she needed “a good fucking”.

She said she agreed to have a “Christmas drink” at his flat in late 1993 because she felt she owed it to her friend to make an effort with him. 

Once at the flat, she said she had a glass of red wine and a few puffs of a spliff, but quickly became completely disoriented. She said she believed she may have been drugged, and that Jones proceeded to have sex with her against her will.

She told the court that when she resisted him, Jones shouted at her and called her “a prick tease”. Jones denied having ever met the woman.

The second woman in the November trial said she was at Jones’s flat when he asked her to sniff a liquid from a small medicinal bottle, which immediately made her feel woozy and “really out of it”. While she was incapacitated, she said Jones had sex with her.

She recalled the assault was painful as she had not been expecting it and described his attack as “opportunistic”.

At trial Jones denied raping the second woman and said he had a consensual sexual relationship with her, but that he broke it off after finding it had become too “intense”.

Jones also admitted on the stand to occasionally using “poppers” — a drug that can make an individual feel high when inhaled — during sexual intercourse in the 1990s but said he had only ever done so with the full consent of his sexual partners. 

Jones, who once featured in the Sunday Times rich list, had denied all the charges in both trials. In 2015, he was awarded an MBE for services to the digital economy.

Isla Chilton, senior district crown prosecutor for the North West Rape and Serious Sexual Offence Unit at the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “Jones raped two women with no thought for how his actions would affect them.

“By denying the offences, he compounded the harm to the women, attempting to evade responsibility for his actions. The jury saw through his lies and found him guilty.”

The young female employee in the January trial told the court that Jones attacked her during a work trip in his penthouse suite, which her bedroom adjoined.

She said he began pulling her towards him despite her clear resistance while they were sitting on a sofa. Jones then demanded to see her knickers and attempted to forcefully prise her thighs apart, but she managed to get away from him, ran to her room and locked the door, the jury was told. 

The trials were closely followed by former employees of UKFast, which rebranded as ANS after the initial charges against Jones became public in 2021. Under his leadership the company regularly featured in the Sunday Times’ “Best Companies to Work For” list.

More than 30 former employees spoke to the FT in 2019 alleging a toxic working culture at UKFast under Jones’s leadership. Many claimed that sexual harassment or inappropriate behaviour by their former boss was commonplace, including unwanted massages, meetings in hot tubs and saunas, and intrusive questions about their sex lives.

Two women told the FT at the time that they had been sexually assaulted by the entrepreneur, allegations he denied. 

The former employees also alleged a workplace culture of fear, with Jones prone to angry, unpredictable outbursts and presiding over a “hire and fire” atmosphere. 

Jones stood down as chief executive of UKFast shortly after the FT investigation was published in 2019. Inflexion, the private equity firm that had a minority stake in the internet company at the time, bought out Jones and his wife Gail, also a director at UKFast, in 2020.