One man is confirmed dead, six missing and 15 rescued after yacht sinks off the coast of Sicily
THE IT entrepreneur Mike Lynch is missing after the 56m (183ft) yacht, the Bayesian, sank in bad weather. The boat was only some 700 metres from the harbour when it sank.
Francesco Venuto, the spokesperson for Sicily’s civil protection agency, told the BBC that they “think [the corpses] must be there [in the boat]”.
“We’ve been searching all day with helicopters and boats, we’ve found nothing. That wouldn’t make sense, in this conditions we should have found something by now,” Venuto adds.
One death has been confirmed by officials so far.
The boat is believed to have been hit by a waterspout — or mini tornado. There are fears that those who didn’t escape are trapped inside the boat several metres below the surface
Mike Lynch, accused of leading Britain’s biggest ever corporate fraud, was acquitted in June, two months ago, in a San Francisco court of 15 counts of fraud.
The charges related to focus on the £8bn sale of his data analytics company, Autonomy, to Hewlett Packard (HP), the American tech giant.
Dr Lynch and was cleared of all charges.
In 2018, the US Justice Department alleged that Lynch and Chamberlain unlawfully inflated Autonomy’s value prior to its acquisition. The charges said that the pair had “”artificially inflated Autonomy’s revenues by backdating written agreements to record revenue in prior periods.”
Dr Lynch was born to Irish parents from humble backgrounds, something that was impressed on the jury. The Lynchs moved from Carrick-on-Suir in Tipperary to Essex, where the young Mike was brought up. His mother was a nurse from Tipperary, his father a fireman from Co. Cork. His Irish heritage, and the fact that his parents were “poor Irish immigrants” to Britain has been alluded to in the trial.
During his testimony Dr Lynch addressed the jury, speaking about growing up during the Troubles in 1970s London as the son of Irish immigrants — “You had to learn to run fast,” he said — and of his first job as a cleaner at the hospital where his mother worked as a nurse. “I’m still a demon mopper,” he said.