British tech billionaire Mike Lynch is missing off Sicily’s coast after a yacht sank. One person is dead, and six others are missing after a UK-flagged superyacht named Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily in a storm. The local media reports that Mr. Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter is among those missing, while his wife, Angela Bacares, is confirmed to be among the 15 people who were rescued. The yacht, believed to have been named after a mathematical equation, is owned by the family of Mr. Lynch.
A recently freed man, Mr. Lynch was cleared of all charges by a US jury in a high-profile fraud case related to the sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011. He had been accused of conspiracy and attempted fraud over the £8.3bn sale to HP, a deal that had been subject to costly legal action. For over a year, he remained under house arrest while awaiting trial and spent a night in custody.
Politicians and business leaders protested vehemently at his extradition to the US to face charges, arguing that if there was a case to be heard, it should be heard in the UK as Autonomy was a UK-listed, UK-regulated, and UK-audited company. The case was the biggest tech takeover of a FTSE 100 firm at the time, but HP wrote down £5.5bn of Autonomy’s value within a year, claiming revenue streams were inflated.
A mathematician who specialized in probability, Mr. Lynch would have been aware of the odds being stacked against him in the US trial. The vast majority of defendants agree to plead guilty to a lesser sentence. Analysis by the Pew Research Centre think tank suggested that, in 2022, just 0.4% of defendants in US federal criminal cases went to trial and were acquitted. Had he been convicted, he could have faced 20 years in jail.
Danny Fortson, US West Coast correspondent for The Sunday Times, who interviewed Mr. Lynch just over a month ago, told Sky News that after being found not guilty, the tycoon said he had been given a “second life.” “When I met him, the thing that struck me was he was in a state of shock,” Mr. Fortson said. “He was fighting fraud charges that threatened to put him in jail for the rest of his life for more than a decade, and he won against all the odds.”
During his house arrest, Mr. Lynch only had the company of a sheepdog called Faucet, who, Mr. Fortson said, was almost “surgically attached” to the mathematician as they spent 24 hours a day together for more than a year. “The dog was very protective of him, and he obviously loved the dog very much,” Mr. Fortson said.
While he won the US case, Mr. Lynch did lose a multi-billion-pound fraud action brought to the High Court by HP. It found that HP had “substantially” succeeded in its civil case but indicated that the firm would get considerably less than the $5bn (£3.7bn) it had sought in damages.
The Serious Fraud Office looked into the acquisition but in 2015 dropped its investigation. As a serial entrepreneur, Ilford-born Mr. Lynch has been described as the British Bill Gates and the UK’s first tech billionaire. In 2023, The Sunday Times rich list valued him and his wife at £852m. Ms. Bacares is confirmed to be among the rescued.
He co-founded cyber-security business Darktrace, another former FTSE 100 company. But his connections to the company, at a time when he was facing serious charges, depressed its share price and made it vulnerable to a US private equity company takeover, Mr. Lynch said. This prediction was proved right in April when US private equity firm Thoma Bravo agreed to a £4.2bn takeover of Darktrace.
