British Tech Tycoon Mike Lynch, Others, Missing After Luxury Yacht Sinks in Italy

The 59-year-old British IT investor Mike Lynch is one of the people missing when his luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily, Italy, due to damage from a tornado.

Italian Coastguard announced that the body of the yacht’s Canadian-Antiguan cook, Recaldo Thomas, had been located, making one person known to have perished after it sank off the coast of Palermo, Sicily.

A large portion of Lynch’s wealth came from his co-founding of Autonomy, a tech business that HP, the parent company of Hewlett-Packard, acquired for $11 billion in 2011.

Lynch’s total net worth has been disclosed by his lawyer to be approximately $450 million.

One of the largest British tech acquisitions at the time, Autonomy’s sales swiftly soured, with HP wiping off the company’s $8.8 billion worth in less than a year.

HP intended to grow its software division with the Autonomy acquisition.

Rather, legal issues that recently resulted in a fraud prosecution have hampered the spectacular sale.

The Italian publication La Repubblica reports that two of the missing passengers are American and four are British.

Citing a source close to the search effort, AFP said on Tuesday that divers had discovered a second body inside the sunk boat. However, authorities have not yet verified it.

Newsng gathered that Angela Bacares, Lynch’s spouse, was among the fifteen individuals who were saved. Charlotte Golunski, 36, a board director of Lynch’s software business Luminance, her husband James, and their one-year-old daughter Sophie were among those saved.

It is believed that Golunski saved her daughter’s life by holding her above her head when she was submerged in water.

Company paperwork obtained by the Reuters news agency showed that the owner of the yacht is Revtom Limited, a company that is exclusively controlled by Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares.

We earlier reported that a Middle Eastern deep-tech AI startup, Intelmatix, has secured $20 million in Series A funding.