The ' British Bill Gates' missing after his luxury superyacht sunk off the coast of Palermo was living a "second life" after being freed from a prolonged 13-year legal battle. 58-year-old Mike Lynch , who was acquitted in June following a US fraud trial, was among the six people who remain unaccounted for after their chartered sailboat sank when a tornado over the water known as a waterspout struck the area overnight. One body has been recovered, and police divers were trying to reach the hull of the ship, which was resting at a depth of 163 feet off Porticello, near Palermo, where it had been anchored, rescue authorities said.
Mr Lynch's disappearance comes just months after cleared of charges alleging he orchestrated a fraud and conspiracy leading up to an $11 billion deal (£8billion) that turned into a costly albatross for Silicon Valley pioneer Hewlett Packard. The not-guilty verdicts reached in June this year by a federal court jury in San Francisco followed an 11-week criminal trial that delved into the history of HP’s 2011 acquisition of Autonomy, a business software that Lynch founded and then oversaw as CEO in Britain. The jury acquitted Mr Lynch on all 15 felony counts facing him.
Toward the end of the trial, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer threw out a count of securities fraud included in the U.
S. Justice Department case against him in an indictment dating back to 2018. It took years to extradite Mr Lynch from the U.
K. and then more legal wrangling before the trial finally began in mid-March. He told The Times after his acquittal he had a "second life" following the jury's decision to find him not guilty, admitting it was like a near-death experience.
“That is very much how I handled it,” he said. “It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?” He admitted that that had he been found guilty "it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.
” Mr Lynch had been free on $100 million bail (£77million). Being accused of a massive fraud represented a dramatic turn in fortune for an entrepreneur once described as the Bill Gates of Britain — a title he seemed to live up to when he negotiated the Autonomy sale that generated a windfall of more than $800 million (£616million) for him. Mr Lynch spent years fiercely denying he did anything wrong, while painting HP as a technological train wreck.
It was another setback for HP, which had spent years blaming Mr Lynch for duping the company into a deal that deepened its troubles and stained a legacy dating back to the company’s 1939 inception in a Silicon Valley garage. Following the verdict Mr Lynch said he was elated with the verdict and thanked the jury for poring over the facts in the complex case. “I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field,” Mr Lynch said.
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