British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, his high-flying Big Apple lawyer and a Morgan Stanley banking boss are among the six people still missing after the luxury superyacht they were vacationing on sank off Sicily’s coast. Lynch, 59, and his friends were believed to have been celebrating on board the 160-foot Bayesian sailboat after the entrepreneur was acquitted just weeks ago of criminal fraud charges in a high-profile case in the US. Among those on board the yacht — which sank after being struck by an intense storm early Monday — is his defense lawyer, Christopher Morvillo, and Jonathan Bloomer, a finance exec who served as a character witness during the trial.
As authorities scramble to locate the missing, here is what we know about the people who are believed to be in the wreckage of the yacht and feared dead. Mike Lynch The tech tycoon , often dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates,” is the man behind the UK’s biggest software company — Autonomy. Lynch, 59, was lauded by shareholders, scientists and lawmakers when he sold Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion back in 2011.
The sale of his software company cemented the tech tycoon’s reputation as a tech industry titan — but the deal quickly soured when Hewlett-Packard wrote down Autonomy’s value by $8.8 billion after alleging it had discovered a massive accounting scandal at the business. Lynch spent the next 12 years fighting to clear his name, and was acquitted of US fraud charges just two months ago by a Sa.