'British Bill Gates' among missing in yacht sinking in Italy

British tech mogul Mike Lynch is among six people missing when a luxury superyacht with 22 passengers and crew aboard sank in a storm overnight Sunday night near Palermo in southern Italy.

The 56-metre-long sailboat, named “Bayesian” and flying the British flag, sank off the coast of Porticello, a coastal town about 15 km east of Palermo (Sicily), around 05:00 (03:00 GMT) on Monday following a severe storm, the coastguard explained.

In the middle of the night, violent winds and a veritable deluge swept the coast, causing material damage to beach establishments: according to several media reports, this area was crossed by a waterspout, a rotating column of air and water.

Twelve passengers and ten crew members were on board the yacht, the majority of whom were British.

Among them, tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, nicknamed “the British Bill Gates”, who is missing, the director of the Sicilian Civil Protection, Salvo Cocina, told AFP.

– “Many were screaming” –

This 59-year-old businessman, founder of the software publisher Autonomy, is one of the most famous British entrepreneurs in tech.

British entrepreneur Mike Lynch, June 21, 2011 in London © POOL – BEN GURR

His daughter Hannah is also missing but his wife Angela Bacares was rescued and admitted to a local hospital with minor injuries, an AFP correspondent noted.

A total of 15 people were rescued and seven were initially reported missing – a crew member and six passengers, of British, American and Canadian nationality. The body of one of the seven missing was later found in the wreckage of the sailboat.

“Our priority is to cooperate with the ongoing search and provide all necessary support to the surviving passengers and crew,” the yacht's British-based owner, Camper & Nicholsons, said in a statement.

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Charlotte Golunski, a 35-year-old British passenger on the yacht who was with her husband, said she lost her one-year-old daughter “for two seconds” in the water before she was rescued.

“I immediately held her in my arms amid the fury of the waves. Many were screaming. Fortunately, the lifeboat was inflated and 11 of us climbed aboard,” she told Italian news agency Ansa. The woman and her baby were hospitalized but are out of danger.

Among the other survivors, mostly British, were also two Franco-British, a Sri Lankan, a New Zealander and an Irishman, media reported.

On Monday, the sun returned, allowing rescue services to conduct searches in calm seas involving a helicopter and divers around the wreck of the boat, located at a depth of 50 m.

– Waterspout –

According to media reports, the sailboat, which had dropped anchor about 700 meters off the port of Porticello, found itself in the path of a waterspout, a phenomenon increasingly observed in Europe in recent years.

A coastguard boat, a boat and a helicopter from the Italian fire brigade search for six missing passengers after recovering a victim of the sinking of a sailboat off Porticello, on August 19, 2024 in Sicily © AFP – Alessandro FUCARINI

“We were there, the first to help, but we found no one in the sea, we only found cushions and the remains of the boat, we immediately called the port,” Fabio Cefalù, a fisherman who saw the disturbance approaching “around 3:30 a.m.”, told AFP.

“That boat was all lit up. Around 4:30 a.m., it was no longer there (…). A normal holiday day spent happily at sea turned into a tragedy,” said a witness, quoted by Ansa.

In recent years, Mike Lynch had been particularly well-known for a trial in a fraud case related to the sale of Autonomy software to the American group HP for 11 billion dollars in 2011.

HP had accused Autonomy of having rigged its accounts, accusing Mike Lynch in particular of having artificially inflated the declared revenues, the growth in turnover and the margins of the company.

In 2023, he was extradited from the United Kingdom to the United States to be tried in this case but he was acquitted in June following a trial in San Francisco.

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