Who was Mike Lynch, the tech entrepreneur among the missing after a superyacht sank?
By Jordan Valinsky, CNN
New York (CNN) — The body of Mike Lynch, the 59-year-old British tech investor, has been recovered from the sunken Bayesian superyacht, Italian interior ministry office Massimo Mariani told Reuters on Thursday.
Early Monday morning, a luxury yacht he was on was hit by a tornado and sunk off the coast of Sicily, Italy.
Lynch garnered much of his wealth from cofounding Autonomy, a tech company purchased by Hewlett-Packard, or HP, for $11 billion in 2011. An attorney for Lynch recently revealed that the entrepreneur’s total worth is around $450 million.
The Autonomy sale was one of the biggest British tech deals at the time but quickly went sour, with HP writing down Autonomy’s value by $8.8 billion within a year. The Autonomy acquisition was meant to fuel HP’s software business. Instead, the blockbuster sale has been bogged down by legal problems that recently culminated with a fraud trial.
Prosecutors accused Lynch and former Autonomy finance executive Stephen Chamberlain of scheming to inflate Autonomy’s revenue before selling to HP. In June, Lynch was acquitted on 15 charges — one count of conspiracy and 14 counts of wire fraud — in a San Francisco court.
The verdict came as a surprise to Lynch. “When you hear that answer, you jump universes. If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense,” he told the Times, a UK newspaper.
Autonomy, founded in 1996, became Britain’s biggest software company and a member of the blue-chip FTSE 100 index. Lynch was lauded at the time by academics and scientists and was asked to advise the British government on technology and innovation.
The vessel Lynch was on, the Bayesian, is linked to his wife, Angela Bacares, who was among those rescued. Ownership records held by maritime information service Equasis show that the 56-meter yacht is owned by the Isle of Man-registered Revtom Limited, a company owned by his wife.
Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter Hannah is still missing, Mariani said, and divers are still searching the area where the vessel sank.
Earlier Thursday, a fifth body was brought to shore from the wreck of the boat, which sank earlier in the week. A CNN team on the ground saw Italian authorities move the body from a rescue boat to ambulances at the Sicilian port of Porticello.
–Reuters and CNN’s Barbie Latza Nadeau contributed to this report.
The-CNN-Wire
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