Mike Lynch, the 59-year-old British tech investor, is among those missing after a tornado hit a luxury yacht he was on, sinking it off the coast of Sicily, Italy, early Monday, a source told CNN.
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.
Fifteen others were rescued from the scene. One child was airlifted to the children’s hospital in Palermo, and eight people were hospitalized in total, according to the mayor’s office. One body was found on the hull of the yacht, the Coast Guard said.
–Reuters and CNN’s Barbie Latza Nadeau contributed to this report.
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