Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo are among six people missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday, according to Sicily’s Civil Protection agency. UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch, 59, and his daughter Hannah, 18, are also unaccounted for after the incident, which occurred about 700 meters (2,300 feet) from the Mediterranean island’s shore. The 56-meter yacht, named Bayesian, was carrying 22 people, including British, American, and Canadian nationals.
Fifteen people were rescued, including a one-year-old British girl. The body of the yacht’s cook was recovered from the wreckage. The yacht capsized around 5:00 AM local time after encountering a severe storm that caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air, to form over the sea.
The vessel sank near the port of Porticello, just east of Palermo, Sicily’s capital. Witnesses reported that the yacht’s anchor was down when the storm struck, causing the mast to break and the ship to lose balance and sink. Rescue operations are ongoing, with the wreckage lying at a depth of 50 meters.
Divers are preparing to resume their search for the missing. Mike Lynch, often referred to as “the British Bill Gates,” co-founded the software company Autonomy, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $11 billion. Recently, he was acquitted in the US of multiple fraud charges related to that sale, charges that had loomed over him for more than a de.