The search for tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter will resume on Tuesday after a luxury yacht sank off the coast in Sicily in Italy. Mr Lynch and his daughter Hannah are among six missing after the Bayesian yacht was struck by a tornado and sank in the early hours of Monday morning . They were on a trip to celebrate his acquittal in a fraud trial.
Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer, who supported Mr Lynch as a witness for the defence, and lawyer Christopher Morvillo, are among those still missing. At least one person is dead with fifteen on board having been rescued. Follow the latest updates in i ‘s live blog.
The UK Foreign Office said it is supporting a number of British nationals and their families following an incident in Sicily. Britain’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch is also sending a team of inspectors to conduct a “preliminary assessment” into the sinking of the UK registered-boat. Charlotte Golunski, a partner at Lynch’s venture firm Invoke Capital, told of the aftermath of the disaster.
She told La Repubblica that she held her one-year-old daughter, Sofia, to stop her from drowning. She said: “I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning. “It was all dark.
In the water I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I screamed for help but all I could hear around me was the screams of others.” Giuseppe D’Agostino, mayor of Santa Flavia, a village on the coast close to where the vessel sank, said “everyone is helping” the search.
“The community is shaken,” he said. Karsten Borner, captain of a nearby boat, told journalists those missing included the Bayesian’s owner and a child, news agency Reuters reported. He said his crew took on board some survivors who were on a life raft, including three who were seriously injured.
He added: “I think they are inside, all the missing people.” Mr Lynch’s co-defendant in the fraud case, Stephen Chamberlain, died on Saturday after being hit by a car while out for a run in Cambridgeshire. Chamberlain was the former vice president of finance at Autonomy, the software firm Lynch co-founded.
The accusations against the pair related to the sale of Autonomy to American computing giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011 for $11bn (£8.6bn). Gary Lincenberg, an attorney who represented Chamberlain in the case, described Mr Chamberlain as a “courageous man with unparalleled integrity”.
The £90 million yacht was carrying 22 passengers, with Brits, Americans and Canadians on board. Those rescued are believed to include Mike Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares. The couple were worth an estimated £852m in 2023, according to the Sunday Times Rich List .
Morgan Stanley’s International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer who appeared at the trial as a witness for the defence, and Clifford Chance lawyer Christopher Morvillo, are among those still missing. Ayla Reynold, a New Zealand national working at Clifford Chance, survived the ordeal. Her father Lin Ronald confirmed to The Telegraph she had been invited aboard as thanks for assistance in Mr Lynch’s recent court case.
Good morning, welcome to the i live blog. British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah are among six passengers and crew missing after his superyacht was struck by a tornado off the coast of Sicily. Divers will continue the search for those missing near the port of Porticello, east of Sicily’s capital Palermo, on Tuesday.
Luca Cari, a spokesperson for the Italian fire department, said the rescue had been hampered by the depth the vessel had sunk. Rescuers recovered a body on Monday close to the sunken vessel at a depth of about 50m. The body has not been formally identified, but the Palermo coastguard said it was the ship’s Canadian cook.
Lynch, the former chief executive of Autonomy, was acquitted of criminal charges in San Francisco in June following a 12-year legal battle over the software group’s $11 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. Dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates”, he had faced multiple fraud charges with the prospect of two decades in prison. Some of the 22 members on board were members of Lynch’s legal team and their families.
Lynch had planned the trip as a celebration of the courtroom victory, having spent more than a year under house arrest in the US..
