One man has died and six people are missing, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter, after a luxury yacht was struck by an unexpectedly violent storm and sank off Sicily. / (min cost $ 0 ) or signup to continue reading The British-flagged "Bayesian", a 56-metre-long yacht, was carrying 22 people and was anchored just off shore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by ferocious weather, the Italian coast guard said in a statement. Eyewitnesses said the yacht vanished quickly beneath the waves shortly before dawn.
Fifteen people escaped before it went down, including Lynch's wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old girl. A person familiar with the rescue operation confirmed that Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were not accounted for. Salvatore Cocina, head of the Civil Protection in Sicily said Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance were also among the missing people.
Italian media said the dead man was the yacht's onboard chef. The Italian coast guard said the missing had British, American and Canadian nationalities. Survivors said the trip had been organised by Lynch for his work colleagues.
"The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude," a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters. The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters that when the winds surged, he had turned on the engine to keep control of his vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian, which had been anchored alongside him.
"We managed to keep the ship in position and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone," Karsten Borner told journalists. The other boat "went flat on the water, and then down," he added. He said his crew then found some of the survivors on a life raft - including a baby girl and her mother - and took them on board before the coast guard picked them up.
Lynch, aged 59, is one of Britain's best-known tech entrepreneurs. He built the country's largest software firm, Autonomy, from his ground-breaking research at Cambridge University, and became known as Britain's Bill Gates. He sold the firm to HP for $US11 billion in 2011, before the deal unravelled spectacularly following the acquisition, with the US tech giant accusing him of fraud.
Once lauded by academics, scientists and politicians, Lynch spent much of the last decade in court defending his name. He was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June, after he spent more than a year living effectively under house arrest. The coast guard said divers were inspecting the wreck of the Bayesian, which was lying at a depth of 49 metres.
Prosecutors in the nearby town of Termini Imerese have opened an investigation to look into what had gone wrong. Storms and heavy rainfall have swept down Italy in recent days after weeks of scorching heat, which had lifted the temperature of the Mediterranean sea to record levels, raising the risk of extreme weather conditions, experts said. The Bayesian was built by Italian shipbuilder Perini in 2008 and was last refitted in 2020.
Its 75-metre mast is the tallest aluminium mast in the world, Perini said on its website. The shipspotting.com website said the boat was owned by a firm called Revtom Limited.
Lynch's wife Bacares is named as the sole shareholder of the firm on company documents. The boat left the Sicilian port of Milazzo on August 14 and was last tracked east of Palermo on Sunday evening, with a navigation status of "at anchor", according to vessel tracking app Vesselfinder. Reuters Advertisement Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date.
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