The luxury yacht tragedy comes just months after Mike Lynch was cleared of all fraud charges after a long legal battle with US prosecutors. Mike Lynch, the ‘British Bill Gates’ tech billionaire behind the Autonomy start-up, is one of six tourists missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily. The luxury vessel called the Bayesian was carrying 22 people – including 10 crew – when a heavy storm created waterspouts, rotating columns of air and mist.
The intensity of the storm caused the ship to sink. Thankfully 15 people have been saved, but one body has been recovered and six people are still missing, including Lynch. The search for these six people is still ongoing.
Of Irish descent, Lynch is a co-founder of Autonomy, a UK start-up that searched and organised complex data such as emails and phone calls. Lynch negotiated a sale of Autonomy to HP in 2011 for the hefty sum of $11bn. The sale was a major financial success for Lynch as it generated more than $800m for the tech tycoon, reports.
But it also led to a series of major legal battles that Lynch only walked away from earlier this year. Around a year after the deal, HP wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8bn and attributed $5bn of this drop to “accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations”.
HP went on to sue Lynch and former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain for this $5bn drop. HP argued that Autonomy had misrepresented its finances, but Lynch denied the allegations. T.