UK tech tycoon Lynch among missing after yacht sinks off Sicily

BRITISH tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is among the people missing after a luxury yacht sunk off the coast of Sicily, Italy, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

One person has died and six others, including four UK nationals, are missing after the 56-metre boat, called the Bayesian, sank early Monday (Aug 19) near Porticello, according to the Associated Press. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was among those rescued, the person familiar with the situation said, asking not to be identified because they weren’t authorised to speak publicly about the matter. 

Italy’s coast guard is leading search and rescue operations and has recovered 15 people, said the managers of the sailing yacht, Camper & Nicholsons. There were 12 guests and 10 crew on board. 

Lynch, 59, is best known for selling his company Autonomy Corp to Hewlett Packard for more than US$11 billion in 2011, the largest ever takeover of a British business at the time. A year later, HP wrote down the value of the business by US$8.8 billion, and a long-running legal battle followed. 

Lynch lost a civil trial in London related to the case in 2022, but was acquitted in a San Francisco federal court in June of criminal charges that he pulled off Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever fraud.

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 that could 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 firm that uses AI to detect suspicious activity in a company’s IT network. BLOOMBERG