‘British Bill Gates’ and Morgan Stanley chairman missing after yacht sinking

Tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his friend, investment banker Jonathan Bloomer, are among six people unaccounted for after a tornado hit their vessel near Sicily

British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer have been reported missing after their superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday, according to media reports. 

The Guardian reported, citing the head of Sicily’s civil protection agency, that Bloomer, Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, and lawyer Chris Morvillo are among the six people still unaccounted for as of late Monday. 

The yacht they were traveling on, a British-flagged, 56-meter sailboat called the ‘Bayesian’, was carrying a total of 22 people – 12 crew members and ten passengers – at the time of the incident and was anchored off the port of Porticello. 

According to the Italian Coast Guard, the vessel was hit by a waterspout – a type of tornado that forms over water — in the early hours of Monday morning. So far, one man, understood to be the ship’s chef, has been confirmed dead. Fifteen people have been rescued, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares, who owns the yacht, and a one-year-old girl who was saved by her mother.  

Eight of those rescued, including the child, have been transferred to hospitals and are in stable condition, according to The Guardian. Domenico Cipolla, the chief physician at one of the hospitals, told the outlet that most of the survivors had said they worked for Lynch. 

“They are deeply traumatized. As time passes, they realize more and more that this morning they lost many friends,” Cipolla said. 

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The Coast Guard has reported that the missing include British, American and Canadian nationals. New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also confirmed that two of its nationals were on board the yacht, with one confirmed to have survived. 

Lynch, a multimillionaire known for co-founding the software development company Autonomy in 1996, has occasionally been described as the ‘British Bill Gates.’ However, throughout most of the past decade, the 59-year-old has been caught up in court battles over fraud allegations related to the sale of his firm to US tech company Hewlett-Packard. In June, he was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco after spending more than a year living under house arrest. 

Coincidently, mere hours after news of the accident in Sicily, it was reported that Lynch’s co-defendant in the trial and former vice president of finance at Autonomy, Stephen Chamberlain, was killed after being fatally struck by a car while jogging in the city of Cambridgeshire in the UK on Saturday.