The Italian coastguard has started its second day of searching for survivors of a sunken superyacht off the coast of Sicily, including the tech media mogul Mike Lynch. Lynch, the former boss of software firm Autonomy, was one of 22 people on board the luxury yacht named Bayesian. The vessel capsized at around 5am on Monday in a tornado off the coast of Palermo, the capital of the Italian island of Sicily.
The Palermo Coastguard said yesterday afternoon that the Bayesian was around 50m underwater. The Italian fire and rescue services and coast guard confirmed that 15 people were rescued after the incident. Among them was Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares.
Authorities said the body of a man was found this morning , later identified as the vessel’s cook. On Monday evening it posted a video showing divers looking for survivors before renewing rescue attempts on Tuesday. Italy’s fire brigade Vigili del Fuoco said on X that early inspections of the wreck were “unsuccessful” due to limited access to the bridge and furniture obstructing passages.
Mr Lynch, who founded software giant Autonomy in 1996, was made an OBE for services to enterprise in 2006. In June, he was cleared of conducting a massive fraud relating to an 11 billion dollar (£8.64 billion) sale to US company Hewlett Packard.
The search is set to continue today. 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.
“I have texted my daughter and she hasn’t given me any updates about missing personnel or saved personnel. She has only said that there are deaths and she and her partner are alive,” he said. “Ayla is a lawyer who is part of the legal team that were invited to go sailing as a result of the success in the recent United States court case.
” One of the survivors, British tourist Charlotte Emsley, told la Repubblica 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.”.
