(Bloomberg) — British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is among the people missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily, Italy, according to a person familiar with the matter.
One person has died and six others are missing after the boat, called the Bayesian, sank early Monday near Porticello, according to the coast guard and firefighters. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was among those rescued, the person said.
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’s statement.
The incident comes 10 weeks after Lynch, 59, was acquitted in a San Francisco court of criminal charges that he pulled off Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever fraud, relating to the sale of his company Autonomy Corp. to Hewlett Packard Co. for more than $11 billion in 2011. A year later, 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.
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.
“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 prime ministers, co-founded Autonomy in 1996. The company developed software to extract useful information from unstructured sources including phone calls, emails and video.
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.
–With assistance from Donato Paolo Mancini and Flavia Rotondi.
(Updates with detail throughout.)
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