Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo are among six people missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday, according to Sicily’s Civil Protection agency.
UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch, 59, and his daughter Hannah, 18, are also unaccounted for after the incident, which occurred about 700 meters (2,300 feet) from the Mediterranean island’s shore.
The 56-meter yacht, named Bayesian, was carrying 22 people, including British, American, and Canadian nationals. Fifteen people were rescued, including a one-year-old British girl. The body of the yacht’s cook was recovered from the wreckage.
The yacht capsized around 5:00 AM local time after encountering a severe storm that caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air, to form over the sea. The vessel sank near the port of Porticello, just east of Palermo, Sicily’s capital. Witnesses reported that the yacht’s anchor was down when the storm struck, causing the mast to break and the ship to lose balance and sink.
Rescue operations are ongoing, with the wreckage lying at a depth of 50 meters. Divers are preparing to resume their search for the missing.
Mike Lynch, often referred to as “the British Bill Gates,” co-founded the software company Autonomy, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $11 billion. Recently, he was acquitted in the US of multiple fraud charges related to that sale, charges that had loomed over him for more than a decade. The yacht’s sinking coincides with the news of the death of Stephen Chamberlain, Lynch’s co-defendant in the fraud case, who was struck by a car in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.
The Bayesian is registered to Revtom Ltd., and its name is derived from Bayesian theory, which was the basis of Lynch’s PhD thesis. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who was among the 15 survivors, is listed as the sole legal owner of Revtom.
Survivors recounted harrowing details of the incident, with one British mother describing how she and her one-year-old daughter survived because they were on deck when the yacht sank.
The mother, named locally as Charlotte Golunski, described how she was holding her baby above the surface of the sea to save her from drowning. She said they were woken by “thunder, lightning and waves that made our boat dance”, and it felt like “the end of the world” before they were thrown into the water. “For two seconds I lost my daughter in the sea then quickly hugged her amid the fury of the waves,” she told Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
In the immediate aftermath, survivors were rescued by a nearby Dutch-flagged vessel, which tended to them until emergency services arrived. Captain Karsten Borner of the Dutch vessel recounted how his crew spotted a red flare before finding a life raft carrying 15 survivors, three of whom were severely injured.
Eight of the rescued individuals are currently receiving treatment in the hospital, according to the Italian coastguard. The UK Foreign Office is supporting the affected British nationals and their families. Britain’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch is also sending a team of inspectors to conduct a preliminary assessment of the sinking of the UK-registered yacht.
Melissa Enoch
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