He was sometimes nicknamed the “British Bill Gates,” because he was one of the few UK entrepreneurs to have succeeded in new technologies. He had also been at the center of a long legal saga, accused of a complex and wide-ranging accounting fraud, before winning, against all odds, his trial in June. Mike Lynch would not celebrate his name having been cleared for long: on Monday, August 19, he was reported missing after his yacht sank off the coast of Sicily following a violent tornado.

The Bayesian, a 56-meter superyacht under a British flag, on which the entrepreneur was sailing with 20 other people, one of whom died, and five others are still missing, was caught in a heavy storm at around 5 am off Porticello, 15 kilometers east of Palermo, according to a statement from the Italian coastguard.

According to the national news agency ANSA, Lynch was on board with other British citizens and nationals of New Zealand, Sri Lanka, France and Ireland. Italian authorities confirmed on Tuesday, August 20, that Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer, 70, who was also recently appointed head of the board of British insurer Hiscox, was also among the missing. Some of the survivors, including a little girl, were transferred to Palermo hospitals. At the time of the sinking, the Sicilian coastline was battered by violent winds and torrential rain, which at sea translated into the waterspout that caused the accident, sinking the Bayesian to a depth of 49 meters.

Weather phenomena of this nature, similar to small tornadoes, have been particularly frequent in recent days in Sicily, but also in central Italy and Sardinia.

One of the country’s largest fortunes

Lynch’s life had been thrown into turmoil on August 11, 2011, when Hewlett-Packard (HP) bought Autonomy, the company he had founded 15 years earlier, for $11.7 billion (€10.5 billion). The major US corporation, outclassed by the competition with its malfunctioning printers and old-fashioned computers, was hoping to restore its fortunes by betting on this company, which supplied enormous database management software, the forerunner of artificial intelligence.

Lynch, who had grown up in a modest family in East London before studying engineering at Cambridge, became one of the country’s first fortunes, cashing in on his 8% stake in the company to the tune of half a billion dollars.

One of the most important accounting sagas of the last decade quickly followed. HP was struggling, and just a few weeks after acquiring Autonomy, CEO Léo Apotheker, was dismissed, accused of overpaying for Lynch’s company.

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