A tycoon from the world of high tech, known in the U.K. media as “Britain’s Bill Gates,” is among the missing after the sinking of a superyacht off the coast of Sicily.
Mike Lynch, an entrepreneur who made a fortune with a software company but became embroiled in legal problems in the U.S. is one of six whose fates were unknown after the luxury vessel the Bayesian went down on Monday, CNN reported Tuesday.
Also missing are Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International bank, a prominent American attorney, and the two men’s wives.
The Bayesian is registered as owned by a company called Revtom Ltd., which is owned by Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, according to the BBC. Bacares was rescued from Monday’s yacht disaster, the BBC reported.
The Bayesian was anchored near Palermo when it was hit by a waterspout — a form of tornado on the water, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
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A yacht expert speculated that the violence of the storm broke the Bayesian’s 246-foot mast — the tallest aluminum mast in the world, according to the Daily Mail.
That could have caused the yacht to capsize and sink rapidly, the Daily Mail reported.
Of the 22 on board, 15 were rescued and one, the ship’s cook, was confirmed dead.
Salvo Cocino, an official with Sicily’s civil protection agency, described the unusual circumstances in fatalistic terms, according to NBC.
Those on board the doomed vessel “were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.
A Business Insider report published Tuesday detailed Lynch’s history as a headline maker in the business world.
The 59-year-old, born to modest beginnings, earned a PhD at Cambridge and went on to found a software firm called Autonomy that became one of the biggest tech firms in Britain.
Autonomy was purchased in 2011 for $11.7 billion by Hewlett-Packard in a controversial deal that outraged many HP shareholders who considered the price inflated.
The deal spawned a “spaghetti” of lawsuits involving Lynch and Hewlett-Packard investors. The U.S. Justice Department brought 14 charges of fraud against Lynch related to the deal, according to Business Insider.
However, Lynch was acquitted by a jury in June.
The fatal excursion was part of a celebration of that acquittal, according to a Daily Mail report that quoted a former Bayesian crew member being puzzled about how the vessel sank.
The vessel was hit by a “freak waterspout,” the Daily Mail noted, but the crew member had seen it go through rough waters before.
“It seems a bit strange,” former Bayesian chief stewardess Monica Jensen told the publication. “We have been in bad weather with it, crossed the Atlantic. It’s been all over. These things definitely don’t happen very often.”
However, Matthew Shank, chairman of the Maritime Search and Rescue Council, a U.K.-based nonprofit, told the Daily Mail the sinking was a testament to the power of the freak storms known as waterspouts.
“Given the rarity of these events there isn’t really much the captains or the crew could do to prepare for these events given how rare they are,” he said.
Someone on the Bayesian fired a flare as the vessel was sinking, the Daily Mail reported.
“One of the captains from the anchorage said he saw the vessel there one minute and then the next minute the yacht was gone and all he saw was the red flare which indicates to me that this has been a catastrophic incident which has gone very quickly,” Shank told the newspaper.
Lynch and his wife have a net worth of an estimated $450 million, according to CNN.
