One man was confirmed dead and six other people missing, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and International Morgan Stanley’s Chairman Jonathan Bloomer, after a luxury yacht was struck by a sudden violent storm and sank off Sicily early on Monday, Aug. 19.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-meter-long (184-ft) sailboat, was carrying 22 people and was anchored just off shore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by ferocious weather, the Italian coast guard said in a statement.
Eyewitnesses said the yacht vanished quickly beneath the waves shortly before dawn in just a couple of minutes.
Fifteen people escaped before it went down, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old baby girl.
Salvatore Cocina, head of the Civil Protection in Sicily said Jonathan Bloomer and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, were also involved in the incident. Italian media said the dead man was the yacht’s onboard chef.
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Morgan Stanley and Clifford Chance did not return a request for comment.
“The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude,” a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters.
The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters that when the winds surged, he had turned on the engine to keep control of his vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian, which had been anchored alongside him.
“We managed to keep the ship in position and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone,” Karsten Borner told journalists. The other boat “went flat on the water, and then down,” he added.
Lynch’s court history
Lynch, aged 59, is one of Britain’s best-known tech entrepreneurs. He built the country’s largest software firm, Autonomy, from his ground-breaking research at Cambridge University, and became known as Britain’s Bill Gates.
Mike Lynch’s entrepreneurial spirit and technological expertise had made him a prominent figure in the UK tech industry.
He then sold the firm to HP for $11 billion in 2011, before the deal unraveled spectacularly following the acquisition, with the U.S. tech giant accusing him of fraud.
Once lauded by academics, scientists and politicians, Lynch spent much of the last decade in court defending his name.
He was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June of this year, after he spent more than a year living effectively under house arrest.
The coast guard said divers were inspecting the wreck of the Bayesian, which was lying at a depth of 49 meters.
Prosecutors in the nearby town of Termini Imerese have opened an investigation to look into what had gone wrong.
Storms and heavy rainfall have swept down Italy in recent days after weeks of scorching heat.
The Bayesian was built by Italian shipbuilder Perini in 2008 and was last refitted in 2020. Its 75-meter mast is the tallest aluminum mast in the world, Perini said on its website.
It was awarded for its design and can accommodate up to 12 guests in six suites and a crew of 10, according to online specialist yacht sites.
The boat left the Sicilian port of Milazzo on Aug. 14 and was last tracked east of Palermo on Sunday (Aug. 18) evening, with a navigation status of “at anchor,” according to vessel tracking app Vesselfinder.
Reuters contributed to this report.
