Mike Lynch ’s body has been retrieved by Italian divers from the wreck of his family yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm earlier this week, a report has said. Citing a source close to the rescue operation, news agency Reuters reports that while the body of the UK-based tech billionaire has been recovered, Lynch's 18-year-old daughter remains missing. The bodies of five others who were on board the yacht have also been retrieved.
The British-flagged 56-metre-long superyacht Bayesian disappeared beneath the waves after being anchored near Palermo. Lynch had invited friends on the yacht to celebrate his recent acquittal in a US fraud trial against HP. Fifteen people, including his wife, managed to survive the incident.
The body of the onboard chef was found near the wreck, and rescue teams have been searching the sunken yacht for the past three days. Apart from Lynch and his daughter, the other people who failed to escape from the boat were Judy and Jonathan Bloomer, a non-executive chair of Morgan Stanley International; and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife, Neda Morvillo . Mike Lynch’s co-defendant dies in car accident News of Lynch's disappearance surfaced just hours after the death of Stephen Chamberlain , Autonomy's former VP of finance, who was also Lynch’s co-defendant in the US fraud trial.
Chamberlain was killed in a car accident while jogging a few days before Lynch’s shipwreck. Lynch founded Autonomy in 1996, based on his research at Cambridge University, and later sold the company to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2021. However, in 2012, HP accused Autonomy of a massive accounting scandal, leading to an $8.
8 billion write-down of its value. Following a 12-year legal battle, Lynch was acquitted of criminal charges by a San Francisco jury in June. He was celebrating the verdict on his luxury superyacht off the coast of Sicily when the vessel sank due to bad weather conditions.
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