A British tech tycoon and his 18-year-old daughter were feared dead on Monday after his superyacht was struck by a tornado.
Mike Lynch, 59, and his teenage daughter Hannah are among seven passengers and crew thought to have been killed after his £30 million yacht sank half a mile off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning. They were on a trip to celebrate his acquittal in a fraud trial.
The Italian coast guard has recovered one body with six people still to be found in the wreckage of the Bayesian, now 165ft underwater on the sea bed.
A tornado over water, known as a waterspout, had struck the 184ft yacht with 22 people on board as it moored overnight off Porticello, a fishing village 10 miles east of Palermo.
Mr Lynch, dubbed Britain’s Bill Gates, had been acquitted of fraud in a San Francisco court room in June, having been found not guilty on all counts of inflating the value of Autonomy, the company he sold to the US tech giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for £8.6 billion.
In a rare interview following his acquittal, Mr Lynch, who had been forced to spend 13 months in the US under house arrest after being extradited from the UK in May last year, said: “Now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?”
Guests had been invited onboard to celebrate his court victory, including at least one member of his legal team from the City law firm Clifford Chance as well as colleagues at the London investment fund Invoke capital which he runs.
Mr Lynch’s family were also on the yacht, including his wife, Angela Bacares, 57, who survived the disaster but was left using a wheelchair after suffering lacerations to her feet when the yacht sank.
According to La Repubblica, Ms Bacares told doctors that at 4am the boat had tilted and she and her husband had woken up.
The newspaper reported: “At first, they were not worried but then there was a scene of confusion as glass shattered and everything slipped.”
The couple’s daughter Hannah, who is among those missing, had just won a place at the University of Oxford to read English.
Salvatore Cocina, head of the Civil Protection in Sicily, said Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, were also among the missing.
The Times reported that Mr Bloomer’s wife, Anne, is also unaccounted for.
Mr Bloomer is a close friend of Mr Lynch and gave evidence at his trial, where he claimed his friend “wasn’t particularly interested” in the finance side of the business.
The Bayesian, named after the mathematical theory Mr Lynch had used to make his fortune, is one of the 50 largest sailing yachts in the world. Its 237ft aluminium mast was the tallest of its kind when it was built in 2008.
Questions are now being raised about how it managed to sink. It has been suggested that the heavy mast may have made the yacht unstable when the tornado struck. A weather warning had been in place for four days beforehand.
The body of the yacht’s chef, named locally as Ricardo Thomas, was recovered from the water. The other crew members have all been accounted for.
Among the 15 survivors rescued from a lifeboat was Charlotte Golunski, 35, a British mother who told Italian journalists of her determination to prevent her one-year-old baby Sofia from drowning as they struggled in the water.
Ms Golunski, a senior associate at Invoke capital, said: “I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning. It was all dark. In the water I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I screamed for help but all I could hear around me was the screams of others.”
Ayla Ronald, 36, who worked on Mr Lynch’s successful defence, was among colleagues to have been invited onboard as a thank you, her father, Lin Ronald, told The Telegraph.
“Ayla is a lawyer who is part of the legal team that were invited to go sailing as a result of the success in the recent United States court case,” said Mr Ronald.
He added: “She has said to me that there are deaths, and she and her partner are alive.”
Fears grew for the missing on Monday night, with rescuers pessimistic about the prospect of pulling anyone else out of the water alive.
Francesco Venuto, a spokesman for Sicily’s civil protection agency, said that he thought “[the corpses] must be there [in the boat]”.
Mr Venuto said: “We’ve been searching all day with helicopters and boats, we’ve found nothing. That wouldn’t make sense, in these conditions we should have found something by now.”
Giuseppe D’Agostino, the local mayor, told The Telegraph: “With the passage of time it is becoming more difficult to hope for their survival.”
Italian officials, working alongside a team sent from the UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch, will now begin investigations to determine why the Bayesian sank. Experts said it was incredibly rare for superyachts to capsize.