The Italian coast guard on Thursday said that the body of British tech magnate Mike Lynch, 59, was among those recovered off the coast of Sicily from the wreckage of a superyacht whose builders had called it “unsinkable”.
One woman remains missing. She has not been identified, but Hannah, Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, is reportedly unaccounted for.
The family was celebrating Lynch’s recent acquittal on fraud charges with the people who defended him at trial in the US. All passengers were his guests. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was among the people rescued.
The Bayesian — a 56-metre (185 feet) British-flagged sailing boat — was anchored some 700 metres off Porticello, near Palermo on the north of the Italian island. It was then struck by a waterspout — akin to a mini-tornado, and sank within minutes on Monday.
Fifteen of the 22 people aboard, including a mother who was reported holding her one-year-old baby over the waves to save her, were rescued by sailboat Sir Robert Baden Powell.
Termini Imerese public prosecutor’s office investigators were collecting evidence for a criminal investigation, which they opened immediately after the tragedy despite no formal suspects having been publicly identified.
According to the New York Times, the yacht was anchored on a stretch of water favoured by the Phoenicians thousands of years ago for its protection from the mistral wind and, in more recent times, by the yachts of tech billionaires.
The chief executive of The Italian Sea Group, which owns the Bayesian’s manufacturer, said superyachts like these are “the safest in the most absolute sense”.
“First of all, because they have very little surface compared to a yacht facing into the wind,” CEO Giovanni Costantino told Sky News on Wednesday. “Second, with the structure, the drift keel, they become unsinkable bodies.”
Investigators are now looking at why the Bayesian, built in 2008 by Italian shipyard Perini Navi, sank while the Sir Robert Baden Powell remained largely unscathed. The sailboat’s captain, Karsten Borner, said his craft sustained minimal damage — the frame of a sun awning broke — even with winds that he estimated had reached 12 on the Beaufort wind scale, which is the highest hurricane-strength force on the scale.
He said he remained anchored with his engines running to try to maintain the ship’s position as the forecast storm rolled in. “Another possibility is to heave anchor before the storm and to run downwind at open sea,” Borner told AFP. But he said that might not have been possible for the Bayesian, given its 75-meter (246-foot) tall mast.
“If there was a stability problem, caused by the extremely tall mast, it would not have been better at open sea,” he said. Yachts like the Bayesian are required to have watertight compartments that are specifically designed to prevent a rapid, catastrophic sinking even when some parts fill with water.
Lynch is the only person confirmed dead; the other bodies have not been formally identified.
“Everything that was done reveals a very long summation of errors,” said Costantino, adding that bad weather was forecast and all the passengers should have been gathered at the assembly point, all the doors and hatches closed.
Security camera footage of the ship from the shore showed the lights on its mast going out, which Costantino said indicated a short circuit, meaning that the ship had already taken on water.
“It is good practice when the ship is at anchor to have a guard on the bridge, and if there was one he could not have failed to see the storm coming. Instead it took on water with the guests still in the cabin… They ended up in a trap, those poor people ended up like mice,” he added.
Lynch’s death happened less than a week after his co-defendant, business partner, and former Autonomy executive Stephen Chamberlain, died after being hit by a car on Saturday in England. Both Lynch and Chamberlain were acquitted of fraud charges in the US by a San Franciscio court in June after a decade-long legal battle with US firm Hewlett-Packard (HP).
Lynch was once dubbed Britain’s “Bill Gates”, indicating the enormity of his business empire. However, the fraud allegations tarnished his image as a UK tech success story. Since returning home, Lynch — an advisor to two British prime ministers — had criticised the government for allowing his extradition to the US in the first place.
Lynch and his wife, who also had an older daughter aged 21, had a combined fortune of £500 million ($648 million) according to the latest Sunday Times “Rich List”.
He owed much of that wealth to his software firm Autonomy, which he founded in 1996 in Cambridge and turned into a leading British tech company. Autonomy’s search software was informed by Bayesian learning frameworks, inspiring the name of the ill-fated yacht.
Lynch sold Autonomy to HP for $11 billion in 2011 in a mega deal that raised eyebrows at the time. Just one year later, HP reported a write-down of $8.8 billion — including more than $5 billion it attributed to alleged inflated data from Autonomy —plunging Lynch into the fraud case he spent over a decade fighting.
The US prosecutors accused him of taking part in a massive scheme as Autonomy’s chief executive to deceive HP by pumping the value of the company. Lynch was extradited last year and spent a year under house arrest before being cleared.
He could have faced two decades in jail, an ordeal the entrepreneur said he would not have survived due to various medical conditions. Lynch, who made around $815 million from the Autonomy sale, always denied the fraud charges, accusing HP of making him a “scapegoat” for its own failings.
He was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006 with an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to enterprise and appointed to the board of the BBC the same year.
After the Autonomy sale, he founded venture capital firm Invoke Capital, which was an early investor in cyber security firm Darktrace. However, despite the US acquittal this year, the legal saga was not over for Lynch. In 2022, London’s high court ruled in a civil fraud case that HP had been duped and had overpaid for Autonomy.
The court has yet to rule on the billions of dollars in damages claimed by the US group. David Yelland, a reputation management advisor who described Lynch as a client and friend, said in an X post it was “devastating” to think he had lost his life just as he had began to rebuild it. “His entire life is one of beating the odds in the most extraordinary of situations,” Yelland said.
