In June, Mike Lynch walked out of a San Francisco courtroom, a free man under the California sun.
He had been acquitted of fraud in a US federal court, where the conviction rate for those pleading not guilty is above 80 per cent. After 12 years of legal battles over the sale of the company he co-founded, Autonomy, he was “elated” — and ready to resume his position as one of Britain’s most successful tech entrepreneurs.
Lynch had feared that, if he had been convicted, his life would have ended in a US prison. He could not have imagined it would instead end barely two months later on a celebratory sailing trip in the Mediterranean.
Early on Monday morning, the 59-year-old drowned when his yacht the Bayesian sank during a storm off the coast of Sicily. His 18-year-old daughter Hannah, his trial lawyer Christopher Morvillo, trial witness Jonathan Bloomer and three others were also killed.
In a separate tragedy, Lynch’s co-defendant, Steve Chamberlain, had been killed two days earlier by a car while running near his home in Cambridgeshire. By macabre coincidence, Lynch died a day after the 13th anniversary of Autonomy announcing its sale to HP for $11bn.
This series of chance events led some on social media to jump to baseless conspiracy theories. Others complained that the Italian coastguard’s search for Lynch and others was attracting far more attention than Mediterranean migrant boat tragedies.
Yet for friends of Lynch and Chamberlain, there was only shock. “The Greeks never wrote tragedy this cruel,” says Andy Kanter, a former Autonomy executive who stayed on the Bayesian many times. “The cruelty is just unfathomable.”
The sinking of the Bayesian, known for its striking design, also came as a shock to the booming luxury yacht industry — especially for its apparent speed.
“What I don’t understand is how something can happen that quickly, with people not having time to get out of their cabins and up on deck,” says one superyacht expert.
According to one doctor, some surviving passengers recalled the sinking “lasted from three to five minutes in total . . . they said the boat was initially lifted, before it sank. They told us they found themselves in the sea without even realising how they got there.”
There are questions about the role of extreme weather: the Mediterranean reached a record median surface temperature of 28.9C this month. One possibility is that a waterspout, a marine typhoon, struck the boat.
The vessel had a 72-metre mast, one of the world’s tallest, but was far smaller than the motorised superyachts resembling small cruise liners often favoured by the super wealthy.
Lynch’s friends emphasised that, unlike some large yacht owners, he was not ostentatious. “The Bayesian was not a status symbol,” says Vanessa Colomar, a longtime adviser. “Mike enjoyed the wind in the sails, the night skies, the distant horizon, sailing alongside pods of dolphins watching the Italian villages dotted on hillsides go by . . . It was an escape, a refuge and a place to simply be.”
The boat, which was in the name of Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares, was bought in 2014 for about $30mn. The couple did not boast about it. “In 30-something years of knowing him, I didn’t know he had a boat,” says David Tabizel, co-founder of Autonomy.
Another friend who had been due to join Lynch on the yacht this summer was not aware it existed until they received an invitation. Lynch was better known for his love of dogs and his interest in rare-breed pigs and cows at his farm in Suffolk.
Superyacht accidents are not uncommon in the Mediterranean. On August 13, the 30.5-metre sailing boat Wally Love washed ashore in a storm on the Spanish island of Formentera. There were no reported fatalities.
But it remains very rare for a large, modern cruising vessel to founder simply because of the weather — even in a severe storm. The Bayesian’s skipper, New Zealander James Cutfield, who survived, was quoted in Italian media saying: “We just didn’t see it coming.” He hasn’t commented publicly since.
The bare facts are these: the Bayesian was anchored a few hundred metres from the shore near Porticello in Sicily, near another yacht, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, in a place that should have been sheltered from the predicted bad weather. At 3.50am, the position recorded by the boat’s Automatic Identification System (AIS) started to change, suggesting that the Bayesian was dragging its anchor in a strong wind. The last recorded AIS position was at 4.06am, presumably when the boat sank.
The Italian coastguard said winds had reached an extraordinary 60 knots, equivalent to a Force 11 “violent storm” on the Beaufort scale. Karsten Borner, skipper of the Sir Robert Baden Powell, turned on his engine to avoid colliding with the Bayesian. He rescued the 15 survivors. His boat, built in 1957, withstood the storm; the Bayesian, built in 2008, did not.
Giovanni Costantino, chief executive of The Italian Sea Group, which owns the Bayesian’s builder, Perini Navi, tells the Financial Times that the crew should have had time to evacuate passengers.
He suggests that the large opening just above the waterline on the stern, which pivots down to make a bathing platform and launching point for small boats, may have been open and become flooded, and the same might have been true for another waterline opening on the side. However, it is not known if these hatches were indeed open.
On Friday it emerged that Italian prosecutors are investigating potential charges of “negligent shipwreck” against persons unknown.
Survivors of the Bayesian spent the week at a hotel, screened from the world’s media by guards, in the fishing village of Santa Flavia, near Palermo. The locals seemed hardened by a history of deaths at sea. As bodies were retrieved from the wreck, 50 metres deep, on Wednesday and Thursday, fishing boats went about their business.
Lynch came from humble beginnings, the son of a fireman and a nurse, both Irish immigrants.
With a PhD from Cambridge, he pioneered the processing of unstructured data, long before artificial intelligence was fashionable, and turned it into a FTSE 100 company, Autonomy. It was “in many ways a precursor” to today’s large language models, says Suranga Chandratillake, a former Autonomy executive.
Lynch’s talent was combining mathematical and engineering precision with commercial focus. “He took a look at my business plan and said, ‘That’s a load of old shit. I can do better than that,’” recalls Autonomy co-founder Tabizel. “We were a billion-dollar company within a year.”
His robust approach — a judge would later describe his style as “controlling and interventionist” — would bring him into conflict with some City analysts, and Autonomy was dogged by questions about its accounting.
But his friends remember him as straightforward, with a sense of fun and a delight for telling stories to children. He became good friends with the guards who kept him under house arrest in San Francisco, during his US trial.
The legal fight began in 2012, barely a year after HP bought Autonomy, when the IT giant accused Lynch and other leaders of fraudulently inflating the company’s revenues to overvalue it by $5bn. Lynch faced court action on both sides of the Atlantic.
Lynch was shunned by many in tech and politics, but largely remained calm. “I remember saying, ‘I don’t know how you keep going.’ He replied, ‘I have no choice,’” says Richard Holway, a tech analyst.
After being extradited to the US, he brushed aside some advisers’ calls for him to settle, and involved himself in the detail of his legal strategy, including testifying to the jury himself. During his trial, he set Fridays aside for talking to technology companies, including Luminance, an AI legal business that he backed.
Despite legal fees, Lynch’s finances were robust. “My wife has been very good at investing in the things that I’ve told her to from a point of view of technology. We’ve done very well,” he told The Sunday Times. One adviser says Lynch had “got wealthier, not poor, through this entire situation”.
After his acquittal in the US, he said he planned to campaign for reforms to the US-UK extradition treaty, which opponents say is asymmetric. “There was zero sense of bitterness,” says Kanter. But Lynch was also tired: he went to the Bayesian to relax.
Italian and British investigators are looking into the sinking. British police are also conducting inquiries into Chamberlain’s death; they haven’t arrested the driver of the Vauxhall Corsa that was involved.
Lynch died before he could appeal against a 2022 English civil judgment that held, on the balance of probabilities, he had acted fraudulently. That civil litigation will now likely pass to Bacares, who survived the sinking.
Having ruled in favour of HP, the judge must decide what damages to award against Lynch and Autonomy’s former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain (who was convicted in the US). HP has asked for $4bn; Lynch had argued for zero. Judgment was expected as early as October, but may be delayed out of sensitivity.
Ultimately, Lynch’s estate is likely to be asked to cover HP’s legal costs to the tune of double-digit millions. HP would also look to pursue his assets, including those to be passed on to his heirs. But the Bayesian and most of the family’s shares in Darktrace, a cyber security company he co-founded, have long been in Bacares’ name.
Lynch had promised to appeal against the civil judgment. Even death will not end his legal saga; his grieving heirs must choose whether to seek posthumous vindication.
Additional reporting by Victor Mallet, Tim Bradshaw, and Robert Wright
Cartography by Aditi Bhandari
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