British tech billionaire Mike Lynch is missing off Sicily’s coast after a yacht sank, Sky News understands.

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.

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Sky News also understands the yacht – which is believed to have been named after a mathematical equation – is owned by the family of Mr Lynch.

A recently freed man

It comes just weeks after Mr Lynch, 59, was in June cleared of all charges by a US jury in the high-profile fraud case related to the sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.

Read more:
The odds were stacked against Mike Lynch – we can learn from his extradition and unsuccessful prosecution

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 since. For more than a year he remained under house arrest while awaiting trial and spent a night in custody.

Politicians and business leaders alike 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.

It 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 specialised in probability, he 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 thinktank 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.

While he won the US case he 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.

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.

“He kept saying: ‘I have a second life, I have a new lease of life’ and ‘I have won my freedom, and now I have got to figure out what to do with the rest of my life’.

“He was in a state of shock and real gratitude that he had put this huge case that had hung over his head behind him.”

Who is Mike Lynch?

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.

His firefighter father was from County Cork and his mother was a nurse from County Tipperary in Ireland.

In 2023, The Sunday Times rich list valued him and his wife Angela Bacares, 57, at £852m.

Ms Bacares is confirmed as being 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.