Just over a fortnight ago, Mike Lynch was beginning to unwind in the peace and tranquillity of his Suffolk farm after a 12-year legal nightmare.

He was finally a free man - and enjoying the simple pleasures. That included being reunited with his Suffolk friends and his beloved dogs - and spending a restful few days on his 2,500-acre farm near Wickham Market.

He had beaten extraordinary odds to make it back home - as the conviction rate in US federal criminal cases is more than 99%. The San Francisco jury who heard his case cleared him of all 15 of the fraud charges he faced.

It had clearly been a hugely stressful ordeal - he watched his plane's progress carefully and didn't fully relax fully until it had crossed the border into Canada, he admitted. "You never quite know with the American system because they have always got some twist," he told me.

As soon as he could after the verdict came in, he got on a plane home. "It was one of those lovely English grey days. I finally made it home and made it up into Suffolk and that was finally the end of the journey, so that was brilliant," he said.

After a short stopover at his Chelsea pad following his arrival back in the UK, he headed to Wickham Market and was welcomed back by a group of Suffolk friends at his home.

His country retreat in Suffolk is an arable farm, but the family also keep rare breed livestock - including around 60 Red Poll cattle, Suffolk sheep and some Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs which run around in the woods.

In the ensuing days, Dr Lynch agreed to just a few interviews - one of the last of which was with the East Anglian Daily Times on Thursday, August 1.

"Suffolk is totally home for me," he said during the interview. "The lovely thing I find about Suffolk is there is still a real community there. You get to know lots of people doing all sorts of things. When you have been there a time you watch the journey of their lives."

In his case, Suffolk had been his adopted home since the early 1990s - moving to Wickham Market in 2009.

It was his Suffolk friends who helped sustain him during his darkest hours and they remained loyal throughout.

Although he was feeling relieved after being cleared and keen to enjoy his new-found freedom, he also felt strongly that much was amiss with UK extradition laws - and with the US justice system - and wanted to do something about it. 

As far as he was concerned, the US needed to get its own house in order and to address what he felt was a highly politicised and unfair system. 

But back in the UK he felt compelled to speak out. He felt it was deeply unfair that anyone could get caught in the same legal bind as he was and without the means to fight it. 

Any ordinary accountant from Saxmundham who happened to be involved with a US company could in theory be swept up and tried in the US without any meaningful intervention this side of the pond because of the "one-sidedness" of our extradition treaty with the US, he said. This he wanted to help change.

He was also in favour of an equivalent of America's Innocence Project being developed in the UK to help those unjustly accused here but without the means he had at his disposal.

"I have got resources and my life has been about dealing with complicated things," he said. "They get hit by the tsunami in the justice system and sometimes that can up up with things going wrong."

He cited the sub postmaster Horizon IT scandal - something he read a lot about - as one example of the system going awry. "I knew we hadn't done anything wrong," he said. "I was very lucky to have the resources to fight it."

But while clearly aggrieved at his own treatment at the hands of the US authorities, Dr Lynch had only good things to say about the humanity of UK authorities.

He recalled how pleasant the police team at Museum Street police station in Ipswich were when he checked in every Monday as part of his bail conditions as he awaited his legal fate on extradition. He wanted to go back there to thank them.

"I think they all knew it was a crazy situation. I'm hoping I'll get a chance to thank them," he said. "I can only talk about my experience but in Suffolk and London the police in the case tried to do it with as much humanity as they could."

As soon as he was handed over to the American authorities at Heathrow he was put in chains and despite an agreement that he should be put under house arrest he spent a short time in jail before lawyers were able to get the deal implemented as it should have been.

"I was in custody luckily for only a couple of days," he said.

While in the States he made good friends with the armed guards - ex-Navy Seals - assigned to him while he awaited trial under house arrest in San Francisco.

They would often walk his dog Faucet - a Shetland sheepdog which his American wife Angela Bacares bought him as a present - as he was not allowed out.

Faucet was his constant companion during his US ordeal while Angela divided her time between trips to see her husband and looking after their two daughters, aged 18 and 21, in the UK. On his release, the young pup returned to the UK with him to join his five other dogs in Suffolk and was a source of delight to him.

Friends from back home in Suffolk and from Silicon Valley would visit him during his house arrest and this helped to keep his morale up. "It's really important because you are in this nightmare where nothing makes sense any more," he said.

The American justice system was "very draconian" and "horrendous", he said.

But he was not angry. "You learn there are certain directions you can't go and anger is one of them. You have to realise there's someone else in that situation that's why I want to make sure this doesn't happen to someone else."