Search for missing yacht crew, tech magnate Mike Lynch and five others missing

Italian emergency services are searching for the second day in a row for six people who went missing early Monday morning when their yacht sank off the coast of Sicily. Among the missing are British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer.

The 56-metre luxury yacht Bayesian sank Monday morning off the coast of Porticello, near Palermo. A heavy storm with strong gusts of wind was raging in the area at the time. Fifteen passengers were rescued, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares. The yacht was registered in her name. One body, identified as that of the ship’s cook, has been recovered. The lives of the six missing people are feared for.

In addition to Mike Lynch, his eighteen-year-old daughter Hannah is also still missing, as is Bloomer’s wife Judy. Jewelry designer Neda Morvillo and her husband, lawyer Chris Morvillo, have also not yet been found. The passengers are said to have celebrated the recent acquittal of Mike Lynch in a fraud case on the yacht.

Another passenger told the Italian newspaper The Republic that she was woken up Monday morning by “thunder, lightning and waves shaking the boat.” She said it felt like “the end of the world.”

Rescuers managed to reach the sunken yacht, which was lying at a depth of about fifty metres, but have not yet succeeded in entering the wheelhouse, because furniture and cables blocked the entrance. “The fear is that the bodies are stuck inside the ship,” the head of the civil rescue service told Reuters news agency.

Long-running fraud case

The 59-year-old businessman Lynch was acquitted in the US last June in a long-running fraud case surrounding the takeover of his company, IT company Autonomy, by hardware and software company Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011. HP paid 11 billion dollars for Autonomy, but had to write off 8.8 billion dollars a year later.

HP accused Autonomy of fiddling with numbers. Lynch’s company allegedly artificially inflated the company’s revenue and margins, an accusation Lynch has always denied.

The father of one of the 15 rescued passengers told the British newspaper The Telegraph that the guests had been invited onto the boat to celebrate Lynch’s acquittal. Morgan Stanley banker Bloomer testified favourably in the US trial for Lynch, who is also facing a civil case in the UK. Lawyer Chris Morvillo represented Lynch in the case.

Lynch has a reputation as an uncompromising entrepreneur with great influence. The British media liked to refer to him as the ‘British Bill Gates’. During the trial in the US, witnesses said that offices at Autonomy were named after James Bond villains, from films of which Lynch was a great fan.

Interestingly, on Monday, Stephen Chamberlain, the former vice president of Autonomy who was acquitted in the same case, died after a car hit him while he was jogging near Cambridge.

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