LONDON (AFP) – Once dubbed the British “Bill Gates”, tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is among those missing on Monday after a superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily in a sudden storm. The 59-year-old businessman – who was only acquitted weeks ago in the US after facing massive fraud charges – was reportedly with colleagues on board the luxury vessel moored off the coast of Porticello, east of Palermo. His wife, Angela Bacares, was among the 15 people rescued, but his daughter Hannah is among the six missing, Salvo Cocina, head of the Civil Protection Agency in Sicily, told AFP.
Originally from Suffolk in east England, Lynch was a former advisor to two British prime ministers and once a star entrepreneur who seemed to represent a rare tech British success story. The businessman has a fortune of GBP500 million (USD648 million) according to the latest Sunday Times “Rich List”, and owes his fame to his software firm Autonomy which he sold to Hewlett-Packard for USD11 billion in 2011. He founded the company in 1996 in Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate, and turned it into a leading British tech firm.
But just one year after the mega-deal, HP reported a write-down of USD8.8 billion – including more than USD5 billion it attributed to inflated data from Autonomy – plunging Lynch into a decade-long fraud scandal. Prosecutors accused him of taking part in a massive scheme as Autonomy’s chief executive to deceive HP by pumping up his company’s value before its .