UK Tech Tycoon Lynch Missing After Yacht Sinks Off Sicily Coast

(Bloomberg) -- British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is among those missing after a luxury yacht was struck by a tornado and sank off the coast of Sicily.

One person has died and six others are missing after the boat named the Bayesian sank early Monday near Porticello, according to the local coast guard and firefighters. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was among those rescued, according to a person familiar with the matter, asking not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.   

The couple were aboard the yacht celebrating, following Lynch’s tumultuous acquittal from fraud charges, the person said. Lynch was found not guilty by a San Francisco jury just ten weeks ago, over accusations that he had committed Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever fraud during the $11 billion sale of his company Autonomy Corp. to Hewlett Packard Co. in 2011. 

Separately, Lynch’s co-defendant in the HP case — former Autonomy vice president for finance Stephen Chamberlain — was fatally struck by a car on Saturday while out running, according to his lawyer Gary Lincenberg. 

On Monday, Italy’s coast guard was leading search and rescue operations and had recovered 15 people, said the managers of the 56-meter (184-foot) sailing yacht, Camper & Nicholsons. There were 12 guests and 10 crew on board. 

The missing people were British, American and Canadian, according to a coast guard statement.

Specialized divers have been deployed to search for victims inside the vessel, which sank during a violent storm and is now 50 meters under water, firefighters said.

“The yacht had been at anchor and not navigating, as far as we know,” a Camper & Nicholsons spokesperson said.

Bacares is registered as the owner of the entity that owns the Bayesian, according to an April filing in a Jersey registry.

Why the Bayesian Sank

Italy is struck by about 100 tornadoes a year, according to AtmosphericG2, a company that provides weather data to traders. On average, just over 70 are “marine spouts,” occurring off the coast, with another 30 onshore.

A woman named Charlotte Golunski saved her one-year-old baby from drowning by holding the child above the waves, according to Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Golunksi is a partner at Invoke Capital — an investment firm founded by Lynch — according to a page on social media platform LinkedIn. 

“I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning,” the newspaper quotes Golunski saying. “So many were screaming. Fortunately, the lifeboat inflated and 11 of us managed to get on it.”

The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch is deploying a team of four inspectors to Palermo, Italy, to conduct a preliminary assessment into the foundering of the Bayesian, the MAIB said in a statement. 

“We are providing consular support to a number of British nationals and their families following an incident in Sicily,” a spokesperson for the UK Foreign Office said.

Who Is Mike Lynch?

Lynch, who was an adviser to two UK prime ministers, co-founded Autonomy in 1996. The company developed software to extract useful information from unstructured sources including phone calls, emails and video.

Soon after acquiring Autonomy, HP wrote down the value of the business by $8.8 billion and a long-running legal battle followed. Lynch lost a civil trial in London related to the deal in 2022 and was extradited to the US, where he stood trial in a San Francisco federal court. A jury found him not guilty on all counts in early June.

After the Autonomy sale, Lynch set up venture capital firm Invoke Capital, founding a series of tech companies run by former employees. The most successful was Darktrace, a cybersecurity business that uses AI to detect suspicious activity in a company’s IT network.

--With assistance from Flavia Rotondi and Sabah Meddings.

(Updates with co-defendent’s death in fourth paragraph)

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