The Italian coast guard said on Thursday that the body of British technology tycoon Mike Lynch, 59, was among those recovered off the coast of Sicily from the wreckage of a superyacht that its builders had called “unsinkable.”
British tech tycoon Mike Lynch was among the victims whose bodies were found on Monday aboard a luxury yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily. (Bloomberg Photo)
One woman remains missing: Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, who has not been identified, is reported missing.
Mr Lynch’s family, along with those who defended him in his US trial, were celebrating his recent acquittal on fraud charges. All the passengers were guests of Mr Lynch. His wife, Angela Bacalez, was among those rescued.
The Baysian, a 56-metre (185-foot) British-flagged sailing ship, had been anchored about 700 metres off the coast of Porticello, near Palermo, in the north of the Italian island, when it was struck by a water tornado, similar to a mini-tornado, and sank within minutes on Monday.
Fifteen of the 22 people on board were rescued by the yacht Sir Robert Baden-Powell, including a mother who reportedly threw her one-year-old baby overboard to save him.
Investigators from the Termini Imerese prosecutor’s office opened a criminal investigation and collected evidence immediately after the tragedy, even though no formal suspects had been made public.
The yacht is anchored in waters that were favored by the Phoenicians thousands of years ago for protection from the Mistral winds, and that have more recently been home to yachts belonging to tech billionaires, according to The New York Times.
The chief executive of Italian Sea Group, which owns the Baysian’s manufacturer, said such superyachts were “the safest in the absolute sense”.
“Firstly, it has a very small surface area compared to a yacht facing the wind,” CEO Giovanni Costantino told Sky News on Wednesday. “Secondly, the drifting keel construction makes it an unsinkable hull.”
Investigators are now looking into why the Sir Robert Baden-Powell was largely unscathed while the Basian, built in 2008 by Italian shipyard Perini Navi, sank. The ship’s captain, Carsten Borner, said the vessel suffered minimal damage – just a broken sunshade frame – despite winds estimated to have reached a maximum of 12 on the Beaufort scale.
Borner said the ship remained at anchor with its engines running to keep it in position as a forecasted storm approached. “We could have just anchored before the storm and run downwind in open sea,” Borner told AFP. But the Baysian’s 75-metre (246-foot) mast made that impossible, he said.
“If there were stability issues due to the very tall masts, it wouldn’t have been a good situation in the open sea,” he said. Yachts like the Baysian are required to have watertight compartments specially designed to prevent rapid and catastrophic sinking even if some of them become waterlogged.
Only Lynch has been confirmed dead; the identities of the other bodies have not been officially confirmed.
“Everything that was done was the culmination of a very long line of mistakes,” Costantino said, adding that because bad weather was forecast, all passengers should have gathered at a muster area and all doors and hatches should have been closed.
Security camera footage of the ship from shore showed the lights on the mast were out, which Costantino said indicated a short circuit and meant the ship was already taking on water.
“It is good practice to have a guard on the bridge when the ship is at anchor and with a guard there it is impossible to miss the coming of a storm. But the ship flooded while the passengers were still in their cabins… They were trapped and the poor souls died like rats,” he added.
Lynch’s death comes less than a week after his co-defendant and business partner, former Autonomy executive Stephen Chamberlain, was hit and killed by a car in Britain on Saturday. Lynch and Chamberlain were acquitted of US fraud charges in a San Francisco court in June after a decade-long legal battle with Hewlett-Packard.
Mr Lynch was once known as Britain’s “Bill Gates”, a reference to the scale of his business empire, but the fraud allegations have tarnished his image as a British tech success story. Mr Lynch, who served as an adviser to two British prime ministers, returned to Britain and criticised the government for allowing his extradition to the US in the first place.
According to the latest Sunday Times Rich List, Lynch and his wife (and their 21-year-old daughter) have a combined fortune of £500 million ($648 million).
Much of his wealth comes from Autonomy, a software company he founded in Cambridge in 1996 and built into one of Britain’s leading technology companies. Autonomy’s search software is based on a Bayesian learning framework and is the inspiration behind the ill-fated yacht.
Lynch sold Autonomy to HP for $11 billion in 2011, a megadeal that drew public attention at the time, after HP reported an $8.8 billion impairment just a year later, with more than $5 billion of that attributable to Autonomy inflating data, embroiling Lynch in a fraud case he’s been fighting for more than a decade.
U.S. prosecutors accused Mr. Lynch, who served as Autonomy’s chief executive officer, of engaging in a massive scheme to inflate HP’s value and defraud the company. Mr. Lynch was extradited last year and spent a year under house arrest before being released.
Lynch could have faced 20 years in prison, but he said various health problems meant he couldn’t survive the ordeal. Lynch, who made about $815 million from the sale of Autonomy, has always denied the fraud allegations and accused HP of making him a “scapegoat” for its own failures.
He was awarded an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for services to enterprise in 2006 and was appointed to the BBC’s board of directors the same year.
After selling Autonomy, Lynch founded venture capital firm Invoke Capital and became an early investor in cybersecurity company Darktrace. But despite his acquittal in the U.S. this year, Lynch’s legal battles weren’t over. In 2022, the High Court in London ruled in a civil fraud case that HP had been duped and overpaid for Autonomy.
The court has yet to rule on the billions of dollars in damages sought by the US group. David Yelland, a reputation management adviser who described Lynch as a client and friend, said in a post on X that it was “heartbreaking” to think that Lynch had lost his life just as he was beginning to rebuild it. “His was a life that overcame adversity in the most extraordinary circumstances,” Yelland said.
