The names of the dead and missing were not immediately released, but a person familiar with the rescue operation confirmed that Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were not accounted for.

Among the missing and feared dead were Lynch’s lawyer Christopher Morvillo and Morvillo’s wife, according to a colleague.

Italian media said the dead man was the yacht’s on-board chef.

The Italian coastguard said the missing had British, American and Canadian nationalities. Survivors said the trip had been organised by Lynch for his work colleagues.

“The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude,” a coastguard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters.

The captain of a nearby boat said when the storm hit, he turned the engine on to keep control of the 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 said.

Borner said his crew then found some of the survivors on a life raft – including three who were seriously injured and “a little baby and the wife of the owner” – and took them on board before the coastguard picked them up.

He sold the firm to HP for US$11 billion in 2011, before the deal unravelled spectacularly following the acquisition, with the US 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. After he spent more than a year living effectively under house arrest, he was acquitted in June by a jury in San Francisco of fraud charges linked to the sale of his software company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard for US$11 billion in 2011.

He said at the time that he was “elated” to be cleared in the criminal trial, in which he denied any wrongdoing and blamed HP for botching the integration of the two companies.

Lynch was reportedly on the cruise to celebrate his acquittal.

Gary Lincenberg, a lawyer who represented Lynch’s co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain in the high-profile fraud case that recently ended with the acquittal of both men, said Morvillo and his wife “are presumed to be passed away”.

“In the course of 48 hours, I can’t process what has happened, but both of our clients, as well as Chris and his wife, are gone,” Lincenberg told Business Insider.

Ayla Ronald, another lawyer at Morvillo’s law firm Clifford Chance, is reportedly among those who survived the yacht’s sinking.

Divers inspect wreck

The coastguard on Monday said divers were inspecting the wreck, at a depth of 49 metres.

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, which had lifted the temperature of the Mediterranean Sea to record levels, raising the risk of extreme weather, experts said.

“The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), which is almost 3 degrees more than normal. This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms,” said meteorologist Luca Mercalli.

“We can’t say that this is all due to global warming but we can say that it has an amplifying effect,” he told Reuters.

The Bayesian was built by Italian shipbuilder Perini in 2008 and was last refitted in 2020, and was managed by yachting company Camper & Nicholsons.

The shipspotting.com website said the boat was owned by a firm called Revtom Limited. Lynch’s wife Bacares is named as the sole shareholder of the firm on company documents.

The yacht’s name would resonate with Lynch because his PhD thesis and the software that made his fortune was based on Bayesian theory.

The ship won a string of awards for its design and can accommodate up to 12 guests in six suites and a crew of 10, according to online specialist yacht sites.

Formerly known as Salute, or health in Italian, its 75-metre mast is the tallest aluminium mast in the world, Perini said on its website.

The boat left the Sicilian port of Milazzo on August 14 and was last tracked east of Palermo on Sunday evening, with a navigation status of “at anchor”, according to vessel tracking app Vesselfinder.

A UK foreign ministry spokesman said British officials were in contact with local authorities over the incident and were ready to provide consular support for Britons who were affected.

Global warming may have contributed to the freak storm that sank the yacht, Italian climatologist Luca Mercalli said on Monday.

Mercalli, president of the Italian meteorological society, said the episode could have been a water spout, essentially a tornado over water, or else a downburst, a more frequent phenomenon that does not involve the rotation of the air.

“We don’t know which it was because it all happened in the dark in the early hours of the morning, so we have no photographs,” he said.

In Italy water spouts can involve winds of up to 200km (124 miles) per hour, while downbursts can produce gusts of more than 250km per hour.

Statistics show that downbursts are becoming more frequent around the country, which Mercalli said may be connected to global warming.

Additional reporting by Associated Press, Business Insider