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[Introduction] British technology tycoon Lynch is missing after his yacht sank near Sicily!

China Fund News reporter Taylor

British tech mogul Mike Lynch is missing after his superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily.

The boss sank into the sea and disappeared

British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily, Italy, according to people familiar with the matter.

The yacht, named "Bayesian," sank early Monday near Porticello, killing one person and leaving six missing, according to the coast guard and firefighters. Lynch's wife, Angela Bacares, was among those rescued.

According to multiple media reports, the superyacht capsized at around 5 a.m. local time while at anchor near Porticello, a small fishing village in the Italian province of Palermo.

The Italian Coast Guard is leading the search and rescue operation, and yacht management company Camper & Nicholsons said it had rescued 15 people. There were 12 guests and 10 crew members on the 56-meter (184-foot) yacht.

According to a Coast Guard statement, the missing include British, American and Canadian nationals.

"The yacht capsized and sank within minutes. Everything happened so fast," Karsten Borner, the captain of the vessel that rescued the survivors, told the media.

The Bajria Municipal Council said the yacht "suddenly sank" and the most likely cause was "adverse weather conditions".

According to the Italian Coast Guard, there were 22 people on board when the ship was hit by a severe thunderstorm in the early hours of Monday morning.

Firefighters said specialist divers had been deployed to search for victims in the wreck, which lies 50 metres below the surface after it sank during a storm.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: "We are providing consular support to a number of British citizens and their families following an incident in Sicily."

The 184-foot yacht was built in 2008 by Italy's Perini Navi shipyard and can accommodate up to 12 guests and 10 crew members, according to YachtCharterFleet.

Yacht brokers value the vessel at about $35 million.

Coast Guard officials said the yacht was anchored near Porticello Harbor on Sunday night when a storm struck the coast, creating a tornado-like column of air and water.

Survivors include Ella Ronald, a lawyer who worked on Lynch's fraud case in the United States, said Ella's father, Lin Ronald, who lives in New Zealand and works in the yachting industry. He said they were on the boat to celebrate a legal victory.

Who is Mike Lynch?

Mike Lynch (59) is a successful tech mogul and founder of enterprise software company Autonomy, which developed software that can extract useful information from unstructured sources such as phone calls, emails and videos. At the peak of his career, Lynch had a great influence in the British technology community and was once called "Britain's Bill Gates" by the media.

The success of Autonomy made Lynch one of the most well-known British technology entrepreneurs. In 1999, he was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" by the Confederation of British Industry, and in 2000 he was named one of the 25 most influential technology leaders in Europe by Time magazine.

But Mike Lynch had just been acquitted in a San Francisco court of criminal charges in Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud case, involving HP’s purchase of Lynch’s company, Autonomy, for more than $11 billion in 2011. A year later, HP wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion in a deal that was later described as one of the worst in Silicon Valley history, sparking a long legal battle.

In 2011, HP announced that it would spend approximately US$11 billion to acquire Autonomy. The bid was 58% higher than Autonomy's stock price at the time. The acquisition was completed in October of that year.

In 2012, HP issued a statement saying that an internal investigation found that some former Autonomy executives used improper accounting standards, insufficient disclosure and false statements to mislead HP's acquisition valuation of Autonomy, forcing HP to make an $8.8 billion asset write-down decision.

Lynch then "categorically denied" HP's allegations, calling the allegations "completely false" and accusing HP of mismanaging Autonomy after its acquisition. "HP's due diligence before the acquisition was very detailed and was represented by institutions such as KPMG and Barclays. HP's executives have also been involved in the operational management of Autonomy over the past year."

In an interview with the Financial Times, Lynch said that everything Autonomy did was told to the auditors truthfully, and the auditors also recorded it truthfully. "This is a business that we spent 10 years building. It was once a world leader, but it was destroyed by HP's internal strife in less than a year."

In 2018, the US government charged Lynch with fraud.

Lynch lost a civil lawsuit in London in 2022 and was extradited to the United States to stand trial in a federal court in San Francisco. In early June this year, a jury found him not guilty of all charges, clearing him of fraud charges and ending the nearly 13-year dispute.

After selling Autonomy, Lynch founded venture capital firm Invoke Capital and created a series of tech companies run by former employees. The most successful of these is Darktrace, a cybersecurity business that uses artificial intelligence to detect suspicious activity in corporate IT networks.

Lynch was born in 1965 in the large town of Ilford, east of London, and grew up near Chelmsford, Essex. He attended Cambridge University, where he studied natural sciences, specializing in electronics, mathematics and biology.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch pursued a PhD in signal processing and communications.

In the late 1980s, Lynch founded a company, Lynett Systems Ltd, which produced design and audio products for the music industry.

A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition company called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted South Yorkshire Police among its clients.

But his real breakthrough came in 1996 when he co-founded Autonomy, a spin-out from Cambridge Neurodynamics, with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt. It quickly grew into one of the UK’s largest technology companies.