It was supposed to be a summer celebration. had gathered his tried and trusted who had been with him every step of the way helping him emerge unscathed from a gruelling 13-year legal battle. Twelve guests had flown into the picturesque Italian port of Porticello, near Palermo from the , the US, , and , to mark the end of the fraud trial that had consumed much of their lives.
But now , including Mr Lynch, are missing with hopes fading for a successful rescue after the vessel capsized in during bad weather in the early hours of Monday morning. The group had been welcomed on board the six luxurious suites of Bayesian, a 56-metre-long £30 million , by the ten crew. Boasting the tallest aluminium mast in the world - higher than Nelson’s Column - experts now speculate it may have caused her to topple and become pinned underwater in an unpredictable, ferocious storm.
The ship was named after the statistical method, the Bayesian inference, an 18th-century theory that helps forecasters predict outcomes more reliably. Mr Lynch based his entire PHD thesis around it, later amassing his huge fortune after selling Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011. He had improbably beaten the odds in a bitter US legal dispute with the technology giant, convincing a jury that he was not guilty of claims of massive fraud after a long legal fight that finally came to an end in June.
Two months ago he emerged from court with tears in his eyes a free man he pledged to restructure extradition laws that.