He is the tech tycoon dubbed Britain’s ‘Bill Gates‘ who is now feared to have been on board a sunken superyacht.

Mike Lynch, a former advisor to then-Prime Minister David Cameron and BBC board member, is believed to be among the passengers trapped on the luxury yacht which sank off the coast of Sicily this morning.

Divers are desperately searching the wreck of the Bayesian, which is on the sea bed 160ft beneath the water.

The body of a man – thought to be the boat’s chef – was found floating alongside the vessel earlier today, while Mr Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares was among 15 people rescued from the 180ft yacht which was carrying 10 crew members, the owner and 11 guests.

Mr Lynch, 59, who is one of the UK’s richest men and worth an estimated £852million, is believed to have owned the stricken boat. 

Tech tycoon and married father-of-two Mike Lynch is pictured here with his wife Angela

Mike Lynch (second left) is seen in the early days of his techology firm Autonomy in Cambridge

He is believed to own the Bayesian superyacht which sank off the coast of Sicily this morning

Earlier this year he was cleared of all charges by an American jury in the high-profile fraud case relating to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.

It was a major victory for the tech guru – who is a fan of James Bond – after being dogged by legal problems since the disastrous $11billion (£8.3billion) sale 13 years ago.

Mr Lynch was raised in Chelmsford in Essex by Irish parents, with his mother a nurse and his father a firefighter who advised him as a youngster against taking a job which involved ‘running into burning buildings’. 

He earned a scholarship to Bancroft’s School, a private day school in Woodford Green, east London.

After studying physics, mathematics and biochemistry at Cambridge University and achieving a PhD in mathematical computing, he started his first company in the late 1980s with just £2,000.

By 1991, he had established Cambridge Neurodynamics which specialised in computer-based fingerprint recognition, and five years later co-founded Autonomy Corporation whose software was by firms to analyse vast caches of data.

The latter soon became a leading light of Silicon Fen, the nickname for the cluster of tech companies around Cambridge that was Britain’s answer to Silicon Valley.

By 2010, the company was so successful that Lynch signed a £20million sponsorship deal with Tottenham Hotspur – with the name of his firm’s augmented-reality platform Aurasma featuring on the front of shirts worn by the likes of Gareth Bale and Luka Modric.

His rise to fame and fortune had been celebrated as a major and pioneering British success story and the married father of two daughters aged 21 and 18 was awarded an OBE in 2006 for services to enterprise.

That same year, he was appointed to the board of the BBC – and was later elected to then-prime minister David Cameron’s council for science and technology in 2011.

He advised Mr Cameron on subjects including ‘the opportunities and risks of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the government’s role in the regulation of these technologies’.

Yet in March this year he found himself in a San Francisco courtroom to defend himself against fraud and conspiracy charges – and ultimately won his freedom.

Mike Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares (right) was 15 people who were rescued from the yacht

Mike Lynch, a married father of two daughters, was awarded an OBE in 2006 for services to enterprise

That same year he was appointed to the board of the BBC – and was later elected to then-prime minister David Cameron’s council for science and technology in 2011

A frantic search is underway at the site of the shipwreck after the Bayesian sank this morning

A local Facebook group shared a picture of the yacht (left) at anchor last night. The vessel has been named as the Bayesian, and is said to sail under a British flag

The search area this morning off the coast of Porticello, Sicily

Divers from the fire service have been supporting search and rescue efforts

The 59-year-old tycoon had spent much of the previous year living under house arrest in San Franciso’s swanky Pacific Heights area with an electronic tag attached to his ankle, with bail secured on a $100million (£77million) bond.

Fighting his corner was a legal team led by Reid Weingarten, described as one of the US legal system’s most successful white-collar defenders and who previously represented Jeffrey Epstein and Roman Polanski.

Mr Lynch had potentially faced up to 20 years in a US prison if found guilty of 16 counts of conspiracy, and securities and wire fraud, which he denied. 

The charges related to a business deal that was hailed at the time as his crowning glory – the £8.6billion sale of his software and data company Autonomy to US computer giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011.

Mr Lynch personally made more than £500million from the deal, only for HP to later wrote down three-quarters of the value of Autonomy only a year after buying it.

The US company fired Mr Lynch while accusing accusing him and other executives of having grossly inflated its size and profits during the sale.

He had previously lost a 2019 civil fraud case based on similar allegations that HP – now Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) – brought in the UK, with London’s High Court ruling in 2020 that HPE had ‘substantially won’ its case.

His separate three-year battle to avoid being extradited to face criminal charges culminated in Lynch going to the High Court to argue that American prosecutors were guilty of legal overreach which threatened UK sovereignty and its citizens.

His plea was rejected and in May last year he was flown to California, accompanied by the U.S. Marshals Service, still protesting his innocence.

And on June 6 this year he was acquitted of fraud by a jury in San Francisco, while former Autonomy finance executive Stephen Chamberlain, who faced the same charges, was also acquitted on all counts.

In his first interview after the charges were rejected, Mr Lynch told how he had feared he would die in prison – saying that medical issues meant he felt it would have been ‘difficult to survive’ time behind bars.

Mike Lynch told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme earlier this month about his ‘indescribable’ relief after being acquitted of fraud charges by a San Francisco court

Mr Lynch, pictured at the Tate Modern in London in December 2012, had potentially faced up to 20 years in a US prison if found guilty of 16 counts which he denied

The charges related to the £8.6billion sale of his software and data company Autonomy to US computer giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011

Nautical maps show the last known location of the Bayesian just after 2am local time, when it was at anchor

The Sir Robert BP, a Dutch sailing ship which had been anchored nearby the Bayesian, is believed to have rescued some of those on board (file image)

Divers are scouring the wreckage of the superyacht, which is 160ft underwater off the coast of Sicily

He told the Times last month: ‘I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone, because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back,’ he added. 

‘If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense.

‘It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life – the question is, what do you want to do with it?’ 

He texted a friend after being acquitted, saying it was ‘so wonderful to be home’ – and told of his joy about being able to spend more time with his two daughters and their six dogs.

The luxury sailboat which sank today had been docked off the coast of Porticello, near Palermo, when a tornado hit the area just before 5am – wrecking the boat and causing it to rapidly disappear beneath the waves. 

The vessel was still at anchor near the port when the tornado struck, witnesses told Italian news agency ANSA.

With the anchor still down, the storm broke the mast, causing the vessel to lose its balance and capsize, according to reports.

The Italian Coastguard said in a statement that a nearby boat offered assistance to people before emergency services arrived. 

The Sir Robert BP, a Dutch sailing ship which had been anchored by the Bayesian, is believed to have rescued the 15 survivors.

Karsten Borner, the captain of the boat, has described how his vessel was battered by strong gusts, with his team working to stabilise it and manoeuvre it to avoid hitting the Bayesian nearby.

‘We managed to keep the ship in position, and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone,’ he said.

Once the storm subsided, Mr Borner said he and his first mate noticed a flare in the water, and made their way towards it.

Emergency response teams are seen at the harbour near where the boat sank this morning

Emergency and rescue services work near the scene where a sailboat sank in the early hours of Monday, off the coast of Porticello

A helicopter, coastguard vessels and firefighters have been deployed to search the scene

Video posted by Vigili del Fuoco shows the rescue operation on a stretch of sea near Palermo

Search and rescue teams are still scouring the scene, with six people missing and one confirmed dead

There they found the lifeboat with those who had escaped inside, according the one-year-old baby.

Its 35-year-old mother told Italian media: ‘For two seconds I lost my baby in the sea, then I immediately hugged her again amid the fury of the waves.’

‘I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning,’ she added. ‘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.’

Incredibly, a group of 15 of the passengers managed to inflate a lifeboat and clamber aboard, before being rescued by a nearby vessel.

The mother, who is in hospital with her baby where she received treatment for a minor shoulder injury, described the ordeal as ‘terrible’, detailing how ‘in a few minutes the boat was hit by a very strong wind and sank shortly after.’