British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is among those missing after a luxury yacht was struck by a tornado and sank off the coast of Sicily.
One person has died and six others are missing after the boat, named the Bayesian, sank early Monday near Porticello, according to the coast guard and firefighters. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was among those rescued, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The couple were aboard the yacht celebrating, following Lynch’s tumultuous acquittal from fraud charges, according to the person. Lynch was found not guilty by a San Francisco jury just ten weeks ago, over accusations that he had committed Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever fraud during the $11 billion sale of his company Autonomy Corp. to Hewlett Packard Co. in 2011.
Italy’s coast guard is leading search and rescue operations and has recovered 15 people, said the managers of the 56-meter (184-foot) sailing yacht, Camper & Nicholsons. There were 12 guests and 10 crew on board.
The missing people were British, American and Canadian, according to a coast guard statement.
Specialized divers have been deployed to search for victims inside the vessel, which sank during a violent storm and is now 50 meters under water, firefighters said.
“The yacht had been at anchor and not navigating, as far as we know,” said the spokesperson for Camper & Nicholsons.
Bacares is registered as the owner of the entity that owns the Bayesian, according to an April filing in a Jersey registry.
Bayesian
Italy is struck by about 100 tornadoes a year, according to AtmosphericG2, a company that provides weather data to traders. On average, just over 70 are “marine spouts”, occurring off the coast, and more than 30 will be onshore.
A woman named Charlotte Golunski saved her one-year-old baby from drowning by holding the child above the waves, according to Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Golunksi is a partner at Invoke Capital — an investment firm founded by Lynch — according to a page on social media platform LinkedIn.
“I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning,” the newspaper quotes Golunski saying. “So many were screaming. Fortunately, the lifeboat inflated and 11 of us managed to get on it.”
The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch is deploying a team of four inspectors to Palermo, Italy to conduct a preliminary assessment into the foundering of the Bayesian, the MAIB said in a statement.
“We are providing consular support to a number of British nationals and their families following an incident in Sicily,” a spokesperson for the UK Foreign Office said.
Lynch, who was an adviser to two UK prime ministers, co-founded Autonomy in 1996. The company developed software to extract useful information from unstructured sources including phone calls, emails and video.’
Soon after acquiring Autonomy, HP wrote down the value of the business by $8.8 billion and a long-running legal battle followed. Lynch lost a civil trial in London related to the deal in 2022 and was extradited to the US, where he stood trial in a San Francisco federal court. A jury found him not guilty on all counts in early June.
After the Autonomy sale, Lynch set up venture capital firm Invoke Capital, founding a series of tech companies run by former employees.
The most successful was Darktrace, a cybersecurity business that uses AI to detect suspicious activity in a company’s IT network.
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