Mike Lynch: British tech mogul among missing after yacht sinks off Sicily
One person has died and six are missing, including British tech mogul Mike Lynch, after a superyacht capsized off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning.
Lynch, the former boss of software firm Autonomy, was one of 22 people on board the luxury yacht named Bayesian.
The vessel capsized at around 5am in a tornado off the coast of Palermo, the capital of the Italian island of Sicily. The Palermo Coastguard said this afternoon that the Bayesian was around 50m underwater.
The Italian fire and rescue services and coast guard confirmed that 15 people were rescued after the incident. Among them was Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares.
Authorities said the body of a man was found this morning, later identified as the vessel’s cook
Salvatore Cocina, the head of Sicily’s civil protection agency, confirmed this evening that the missing six include Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah and the Bayesian’s chef, Ricardo Thomas.
He told BBC News that the rescue operation will continue overnight, with a specialist caving search and rescue diving team having arrived from Rome, and that the agency hoped to “achieve results” during the night or by tomorrow morning.
A spokesperson for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office told Morning Wire: “We are providing consular support to a number of British nationals and their families following an incident in Sicily, and are in contact with the local authorities”.
The Bayesian is 56m long and was launched in 2008 by Italian builders Perini Navi.
Lynch, 59, became known as “Britain’s Bill Gates” after co-founding Autonomy and building it to become the country’s largest software company.
Two months ago, Lynch was acquitted in the US of all 15 charges of fraud linked to the $11.1bn sale of the business to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.
This came after he was extradited from the UK to California to face a criminal trial, but a jury in San Francisco found him not guilty on all counts.
HP did win a six-year civil fraud suit against Lynch back in 2022 after the High Court ruled that he defrauded the firm by manipulating Autonomy’s accounts to inflate its valuation ahead of the takeover. Following this, then Home Secretary Priti Patel approved Lynch’s extradition.