British tech tycoon and daughter among missing in Sicily yacht sinking following tornado
Superyacht sinks latest: Daughter, 18, of British tycoon Mike Lynch missing; yacht 'in wrong place at wrong time'
Mike Lynch, described as the British Bill Gates, is missing along with his daughter - though his wife has been rescued.
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Among the other survivors is a British mother who says she held her baby above the waves after the yacht capsized.
At least one person has died and six are missing, including the tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter, after a superyacht carrying mostly Britons was sunk in a tornado off the coast of Sicily.
Mr Lynch's wife and a one-year-old girl are among the 15 people who have been rescued.
The yacht is said to be owned by the family of Mr Lynch, a tycoon mathematician who has been called the UK's first tech billionaire and the British Bill Gates.
One person has been confirmed dead - believed to be the vessel's cook - while four of the missing passengers are British and two are American, according to Italian newspaper la Repubblica.
The British-flagged yacht, called Bayesian, had 10 crew and 12 passengers on board and sank at about 5am local time off the coast of Palermo.
Salvo Cocina of Sicily's civil protection agency said: "They were in the wrong place at the wrong time."
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Mr Lynch's daughter, Hannah Lynch, remains unaccounted for but his wife, Angela Bacares, was rescued along with 14 others - including a mother who held her one-year-old baby above the waves.
Charlotte Golunski, 35, told la Repubblica she lost her baby Sofia for "two seconds", adding: "I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning.
"It was all dark. In the water I couldn't keep my eyes open. I screamed for help but all I could hear around me was the screams of others."
The girl's father James Emsley also survived, Mr Cocina said. According to her LinkedIn profile, Ms Golunski is a partner at Mr Lynch's firm, called Invoke Capital.
Mr Lynch, described as the British Bill Gates, was cleared earlier this year of conducting a massive fraud over the sale of software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.
His co-defendant in that trial, Stephen Chamberlain, was separately confirmed dead after he was hit by a car on Saturday.
Sicily yacht sinking: Four Britons among six people reportedly missing
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.
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.
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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.
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'.
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"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."
During his house arrest, My Lynch only had the company of a sheepdog called Faucet, who, Mr Fortson said, was almost "surgically attached" to the mathematician as they spent 24 hours a day together for more than a year.
"The dog was very protective of him and he obviously loved the dog very much," Mr Fortson said.
While he won the US case Mr Lynch did lose a multi-billion pound fraud action brought to the High Court by HP.
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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.
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 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.
credit: Skynews