Tech Tycoon Mike Lynch Missing After Superyacht Sinks Off Sicily Coast

Mike Lynch: the British 'Bill Gates' missing after yacht sinks off Sicily

LONDON (AFP) - Once dubbed the British "Bill Gates", tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is among those missing on Monday after a superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily in a sudden storm. The 59-year-old businessman - who was only acquitted weeks ago in the US after facing massive fraud charges - was reportedly with colleagues on board the luxury vessel moored off the coast of Porticello, east of Palermo. His wife, Angela Bacares, was among the 15 people rescued, but his daughter Hannah is among the six missing, Salvo Cocina, head of the Civil Protection Agency in Sicily, told AFP. Originally from Suffolk in east England, Lynch was a former advisor to two British prime ministers and once a star entrepreneur who seemed to represent a rare tech British success story. The businessman has a fortune of GBP500 million (USD648 million) according to the latest Sunday Times "Rich List", and owes his fame to his software firm Autonomy which he sold to Hewlett-Packard for USD11 billion in 2011. He founded the company in 1996 in Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate, and turned it into a leading British tech firm. But just one year after the mega-deal, HP reported a write-down of USD8.8 billion - including more than USD5 billion it attributed to inflated data from Autonomy - plunging Lynch into a decade-long fraud scandal. Prosecutors accused him of taking part in a massive scheme as Autonomy's chief executive to deceive HP by pumping up his company's value before its sale. Last year, Lynch was extradited from Britain to the US to stand trial, facing two decades in jail if convicted of the 17 charges and spending the year in house arrest. But in June he was acquitted on all charges. "I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field," Lynch said after the verdict was handed down in a San Francisco court. Scapegoat? Lynch - who made around USD815 million from the Autonomy sale - always denied the fraud charges, accusing HP of making him a scapegoat for its own failings. After returning to the UK, Lynch told the Times newspaper in July that he had "various medical things that would have made it difficult to survive" in an American prison. Speaking about the verdict, Lynch had told the Times: "It's bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?" Father of two daughters aged 18 and 21, and a dog lover - owning two dachshunds and four sheepdogs - Lynch has a home in the affluent London district of Chelsea, according to the newspaper, as well as owning a farm in Suffolk. Despite the acquittal, the fraud case is not closed. In 2022, London's High Court ruled in a civil fraud case that HP had been duped and had overpaid for Autonomy. The court has yet to rule on the billions of dollars in damages claimed by the American group. Also sued by HP, Autonomy's former CFO Sushovan Hussain was found guilty of fraud in 2018 by a US jury, with Hussain jailed for five years. The shadow of Lynch's legal troubles has long weighed on the share prices of another British company - the cybersecurity and artificial intelligence group Darktrace of which he is a founding investor. But in a reversal of fortune, Darktrace accepted a USD5.3 billion takeover offer from US private equity firm Thoma Bravo in April, sending its share price soaring. A spokeswoman for Lynch declined to comment when contacted by AFP on Monday.

Who is Mike Lynch? The British 'Bill Gates' missing after superyacht sinks off Sicily

The 59-year-old businessman -- who was only acquitted weeks ago in the US after facing massive fraud charges -- was reportedly with colleagues on board the luxury vessel moored off the coast of Porticello, east of Palermo. His wife, Angela Bacares, was among the 15 people rescued, but his daughter Hannah is among the six missing, Salvo Cocina, head of the Civil Protection Agency in Sicily, told AFP. Originally from Suffolk in east England, Lynch was a former advisor to two British prime ministers and once a star entrepreneur who seemed to represent a rare tech British success story. The businessman has a fortune of £500 million ($648 million) according to the latest Sunday Times "Rich List", and owes his fame to his software firm Autonomy which he sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011. He founded the company in 1996 in Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate, and turned it into a leading British tech firm. But just one year after the mega-deal, HP reported a write-down of $8.8 billion -- including more than $5 billion it attributed to inflated data from Autonomy -- plunging Lynch into a decade-long fraud scandal. Prosecutors accused him of taking part in a massive scheme as Autonomy's chief executive to deceive HP by pumping up his company's value before its sale. Last year, Lynch was extradited from Britain to the US to stand trial, facing two decades in jail if convicted of the 17 charges and spending the year in house arrest. But in June he was acquitted on all charges. "I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field," Lynch said after the verdict was handed down in a San Francisco court. Lynch -- who made around $815 million from the Autonomy sale -- always denied the fraud charges, accusing HP of making him a scapegoat for its own failings. After returning to the UK, Lynch told the Times newspaper in July that he had "various medical things that would have made it difficult to survive" in an American prison. Speaking about the verdict, Lynch had told the Times: "It's bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?" Father of two daughters aged 18 and 21, and a dog lover -- owning two dachshunds and four sheepdogs -- Lynch has a home in the affluent London district of Chelsea, according to the newspaper, as well as owning a farm in Suffolk. Despite the acquittal, the fraud case is not closed. In 2022, London's High Court ruled in a civil fraud case that HP had been duped and had overpaid for Autonomy. The court has yet to rule on the billions of dollars in damages claimed by the American group. Also sued by HP, Autonomy's former CFO Sushovan Hussain was found guilty of fraud in 2018 by a US jury, with Hussain jailed for five years. The shadow of Lynch's legal troubles has long weighed on the share prices of another British company -- the cybersecurity and artificial intelligence group Darktrace of which he is a founding investor. But in a reversal of fortune, Darktrace accepted a $5.3 billion takeover offer from US private equity firm Thoma Bravo in April, sending its share price soaring. A spokeswoman for Lynch declined to comment when contacted by AFP on Monday.

Mike Lynch's journey from tech founder to a years-long legal battle

Richard Waters in San Diego and Michael Acton in San Francisco Mike Lynch, who has been reported missing after the yacht he was on sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily, experienced some of the most extreme career highs and lows of any British technology entrepreneur. A self-made software success story, Lynch went on to become a prominent investor in -- and vociferous champion of -- the UK tech start-up scene. The $11bn sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 was at the time the biggest ever of a European IT concern, cementing his position as the rare head of a British tech company to make it on the global stage. But a year later HP claimed Autonomy's leaders had fraudulently inflated the value of the acquisition by $5bn, leading to a 12-year legal ordeal. Lynch lost a long battle against extradition to the US on fraud charges and spent more than a year under house arrest in San Francisco ahead of a trial. He was eventually cleared by a jury on all charges in June this year. Lynch, 59, was among those missing after the yacht Bayesian, of which his wife was the official owner, sank in severe weather early on Monday morning in the Mediterranean. Six of the 12 passengers and 10 crew members aboard were declared missing, among them Lynch's 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, while one crew member died. The passengers included members of Lynch's legal team and a witness for the defence, who he had invited to celebrate his courtroom victory. The long journey that brought Lynch to a 56-metre, luxury "superyacht" began from humble circumstances. Born in Ilford, Essex, and brought up in nearby Chelmsford, he liked to talk about the hardships he faced during his upbringing. Taking the stand at this year's trial, he said that being the son of Irish parents made him something of an outsider, especially during the political turbulence of the 1970s, when "there were times you had to learn to run fast". He was awarded a scholarship to Bancroft's, a private school in Woodford, Essex, but claimed to shun the trappings of social status. He told the jury that his first job involved mopping floors in a local hospital, and said: "As a 16-year old . . . you realise that whatever it is you want to do, just do it." Lynch went on to study natural sciences at Christ's College, Cambridge university, and later completed a PhD in signal processing, specialising in a technique used in fields such as mobile communications to separate the signal from the noise in digital data. By the late 1980s he had begun turning his expertise to entrepreneurial use with a series of start-ups, beginning with one that designed a device used to sample music. He founded Autonomy in 1996 just as an explosion of digital data was starting to engulf companies and other large organisations, presenting huge challenges in sorting through unstructured data, or information not held in easily searchable databases. The sale to HP confirmed Lynch's success at carving out a globally recognised position in one of the most strategically important technologies of the time. However, HP boss Meg Whitman accused Autonomy's leaders of having falsely inflated the company's revenues in the years before the sale through tricks such as "round trip" deals, where Autonomy paid customers in return for them buying its software. Lynch threw himself into his defence in the years that followed, turning the battle into a personal vendetta against Whitman, who he accused of inventing the fraud claim to cover up her own mismanagement of the foundering US tech company. Autonomy's former chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, was convicted of fraud over the Autonomy sale in the US in 2019 and HP won a civil fraud claim against Lynch in the UK in 2022. Despite these successes, US prosecutors stumbled when trying to prove that Lynch, as the company's CEO, was criminally responsible for the alleged fraud. The jury was presented with two very different versions of the software boss. Prosecutors painted him as a domineering micromanager, while the defence depicted him as a big-picture tech strategist who did not pay attention to the complex accounting issues at the heart of the fraud claims. "I'm not an accountant . . . and I'm not a salesperson," Lynch said, successfully persuading the jury that he was not familiar with the convoluted financial dealings presented in court. "I've sat and watched a parade of witnesses that I've never met . . . and a series of transactions I had no involvement in, and not much else." Though he was ultimately cleared, the indictment in the US cast a long shadow over Lynch's career. Along with a personal fortune -- he reaped more than $800mn from his stake in the company -- Autonomy had earlier provided him with a platform to champion the cause of tech start-ups and take a prominent role in public life. Lynch served as a non-executive director of the BBC and a member of Prime Minister David Cameron's council for science and technology, where he advised on the importance of the coming wave of artificial intelligence. He was granted an OBE in 2006 for services to enterprise. After charges were brought in the US in 2018, he stepped back from many of his public roles. However, he continued to make investments through Invoke Capital, the venture capital firm he set up after the sale to HP. Recently, in his first public comments since the trial, Lynch told The Sunday Times that he wanted to provide support for people who had been wrongly convicted of crimes, and to fight against what he believed was the injustice of extraditions such as the one that had forced him to face trial in the US. "The system can sweep individuals away," he said: "There needs to be a contrarian possibility that's saying, 'Right, well, the whole world thinks you're guilty but, actually, was that a fair conviction?'"

Mike Lynch was celebrating acquittal before violent storm hit - Times of India

Mike Lynch, the British tech tycoon missing after his luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily, had only recently fended off a US criminal fraud case over the sale of his software company to Hewlett Packard Co. Lynch, 59, and his wife were aboard the yacht, named Bayesian after a British mathematician, with a small group of his financial and legal advisers when the violent storm hit.They were celebrating Lynch's tumultuous acquittal just over two months earlier, when a San Francisco jury found him not guilty of charges that he duped HP into overpaying for his software firm, Autonomy Corp. Hailed at times as "Britain's Bill Gates," Lynch has been seeking to restore his reputation as one of Europe's most successful entrepreneurs. For years, he'd argued that he had been scapegoated over the acquisition. HP paid $11 billion for Autonomy in 2011, only to write down $8.8 billion of the purchase price a year later. This is a modal window. The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported. But even after his acquittal on criminal charges, Lynch was still fighting the Silicon Valley giant in a civil case in London, where a British judge held him responsible for creating the illusion of a company much larger and more successful than it really was. Autonomy's success -- its software could extract useful information from unstructured sources including phone calls, emails and video -- made Lynch one of the best-known British technology executives. He was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Confederation of British Industry in 1999. In 2000, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential technology leaders in Europe. Advised prime ministers He was awarded an Order of the British Empire for services to enterprise in 2006. The same year, he was appointed as non-executive director to the board of the British Broadcasting Corp., the world's biggest public broadcaster. He advised two British prime ministers, David Cameron and Theresa May. Lynch made at least $500 million from the HP deal. He then set up venture capital firm Invoke Capital, founding a series of tech companies run by former employees. The most successful was Darktrace Plc, a cybersecurity business that uses AI to detect suspicious activity in a company's IT network. Forbes magazine estimated his net worth to be $1 billion in 2015, the sole year he was named to its list of global billionaires. HP, along with US prosecutors, alleged that Lynch and Autonomy's former finance chief used accounting tricks to inflate the company's revenue ahead of the 2011 sale. The San Francisco trial placed huge pressures on the tech founder, who was forced to wear an ankle monitor and confined to 24-hour supervision by private security guards he had to pay for. On the stand, Lynch claimed ignorance of some of the wrongdoing attributed to him, saying he delegated key decisions to underlings. Autonomy "wasn't perfect," Lynch testified at the trial. "The reality of life is that it's nuanced and it's messy and sometimes you do your best to get through it. And companies are just like that." When the verdict came, following two days of deliberations, Lynch hugged his lawyer and wiped his eyes. HP's acquisition of the company was initially seen as a validation of UK technology and the Cambridge "Silicon Fen" tech cluster where Autonomy was based. But in 2012, HP publicly accused Autonomy and its executives of accounting failures. The lawsuit followed. Lynch chose to fight the civil trial with HP in London before facing a US jury in the hope that a ruling on home soil would help his case. In 20 days of testimony in the UK civil case, he served up a litany of anecdotes aiming to illustrate that HP was riven with executive turmoil and infighting as the company replaced its chief executive officer and pivoted on strategy shortly after the disastrous Autonomy deal. He largely succeeded. Documents showed HP executives turning on each other -- with HP CEO Meg Whitman, the onetime candidate for governor of California and current US ambassador to Kenya, saying she'd be prepared to throw her predecessor Leo Apotheker "under the bus in a tit for tat." Taking over just as HP closed the Autonomy deal, Whitman sought to focus the firm back on its core PC unit to better manage the sprawling business. But after one of the longest and most expensive trials in British history, Judge Robert Hildyard ruled in 2022 that Lynch and Autonomy had fraudulently boosted the value of the company. "One of the tragedies of the case is clear: an innovative and ground-breaking product, its architect and the company will probably always be associated with fraud," the judge said in the ruling. Damages pending The judge was still to decide the damages Lynch would have to pay. HP was seeking $4 billion from him and his finance chief, but the judge had cautioned that it was likely to get substantially less than that. Those looming penalties from the civil suit did not dent Lynch's ambitions once he was released from house arrest in the US. "I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field," Lynch said in a statement after the California jury cleared him of criminal wrongdoing.

Bayesian superyacht party was a celebration of Mike Lynch's U.S. lawsuit victory against HP when waterspout storm struck

Mike Lynch, the British tech tycoon missing after his luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily, had only recently fended off a US criminal fraud case over the sale of his software company to Hewlett Packard Co. Lynch, 59, and his wife were aboard the yacht, named Bayesian after a British mathematician, with a small group of his financial and legal advisers when the violent storm hit. They were celebrating Lynch's tumultuous acquittal just over two months earlier, when a San Francisco jury found him not guilty of charges that he duped HP into overpaying for his software firm, Autonomy Corp. Hailed at times as "Britain's Bill Gates," Lynch has been seeking to restore his reputation as one of Europe's most successful entrepreneurs. For years, he'd argued that he had been scapegoated over the acquisition. HP paid $11 billion for Autonomy in 2011, only to write down $8.8 billion of the purchase price a year later. But even after his acquittal on criminal charges, Lynch was still fighting the Silicon Valley giant in a civil case in London, where a British judge held him responsible for creating the illusion of a company much larger and more successful than it really was. Autonomy's success -- its software could extract useful information from unstructured sources including phone calls, emails and video -- made Lynch one of the best-known British technology executives. He was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Confederation of British Industry in 1999. In 2000, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential technology leaders in Europe. He was awarded an Order of the British Empire for services to enterprise in 2006. The same year, he was appointed as non-executive director to the board of the British Broadcasting Corp., the world's biggest public broadcaster. He advised two British prime ministers, David Cameron and Theresa May. Lynch made at least $500 million from the HP deal. He then set up venture capital firm Invoke Capital, founding a series of tech companies run by former employees. The most successful was Darktrace Plc, a cybersecurity business that uses AI to detect suspicious activity in a company's IT network. Forbes magazine estimated his net worth to be $1 billion in 2015, the sole year he was named to its list of global billionaires. HP, along with US prosecutors, alleged that Lynch and Autonomy's former finance chief used accounting tricks to inflate the company's revenue ahead of the 2011 sale. The San Francisco trial placed huge pressures on the tech founder, who was forced to wear an ankle monitor and confined to 24-hour supervision by private security guards he had to pay for. On the stand, Lynch claimed ignorance of some of the wrongdoing attributed to him, saying he delegated key decisions to underlings. Autonomy "wasn't perfect," Lynch testified at the trial. "The reality of life is that it's nuanced and it's messy and sometimes you do your best to get through it. And companies are just like that." When the verdict came, following two days of deliberations, Lynch hugged his lawyer and wiped his eyes. HP's acquisition of the company was initially seen as a validation of UK technology and the Cambridge "Silicon Fen" tech cluster where Autonomy was based. But in 2012, HP publicly accused Autonomy and its executives of accounting failures. The lawsuit followed. Lynch chose to fight the civil trial with HP in London before facing a US jury in the hope that a ruling on home soil would help his case. In 20 days of testimony in the UK civil case, he served up a litany of anecdotes aiming to illustrate that HP was riven with executive turmoil and infighting as the company replaced its chief executive officer and pivoted on strategy shortly after the disastrous Autonomy deal. He largely succeeded. Documents showed HP executives turning on each other -- with HP CEO Meg Whitman, the onetime candidate for governor of California and current US ambassador to Kenya, saying she'd be prepared to throw her predecessor Leo Apotheker "under the bus in a tit for tat." Taking over just as HP closed the Autonomy deal, Whitman sought to focus the firm back on its core PC unit to better manage the sprawling business. But after one of the longest and most expensive trials in British history, Judge Robert Hildyard ruled in 2022 that Lynch and Autonomy had fraudulently boosted the value of the company. "One of the tragedies of the case is clear: an innovative and ground-breaking product, its architect and the company will probably always be associated with fraud," the judge said in the ruling. The judge was still to decide the damages Lynch would have to pay. HP was seeking $4 billion from him and his finance chief, but the judge had cautioned that it was likely to get substantially less than that. Those looming penalties from the civil suit did not dent Lynch's ambitions once he was released from house arrest in the US. "I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field," Lynch said in a statement after the California jury cleared him of criminal wrongdoing.

Sicily superyacht tragedy: Who is Mike Lynch, touted as UK's answer to Bill Gates

Mike Lynch founded the British tech firm Autonomy that used a statistical method known as "Bayesian inference" for its software A luxury yacht was hit by a tornado and sank off the coast of Sicily early Monday. Twenty-two people were on board, of which one is confirmed dead. Fifteen people were rescued, with the rest still missing. The yacht was also ferrying British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and is among those missing. Reports say that his daughter was also on the 56m superyacht called Bayesian. CNN reported, quoting a source, that Lynch's wife Angela Bacares was rescued. Eight of those rescued are being treated at a hospital. Lynch is an extremely popular business tycoon who was once touted as the UK's answer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates. He founded the British tech firm Autonomy in 1996 and is also behind many other successful tech firms. His wealth is largely because of the sale he made to US computing giant Hewlett-Packard (HP). He sold his company Autonomy to HP for $11bn in 2011. But the high-profile acquisition landed Lynch into controversy and he was mired in a legal battle for over a decade. He was facing two decades in jail on multiple fraud charges but was acquitted in the US. In 2018, US prosecutors charged him for artificially inflating the company's value. Also Read: Tornado sinks luxury vessel; one dead, UK's 'Bill Gates' among 6 missing They accused him of concealing the firm's loss-making business and of intimidating or paying off people who raised concerns. In an interview with BBC, he admitted that he was able to prove his innocence because of his wealth. "You shouldn't need to have funds to protect yourself as a British citizen," he said. Lynch was born on June 16, 1965. His mother was a nurse while his dad was a fireman. He studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge before earning a PhD in mathematical computing and later a research fellowship. He used this research to enter the tech world and to start Autonomy. But before Autonomy, he established Cambridge Neurodynamics, a firm specialising in the use of computer-based detection and recognition of fingerprints. In 1996, Autonomy came into existence and had a statistical method known as "Bayesian inference" at the core of its software. Its unique ability fascinated the tech world. The software could extract certain information from data such as phone calls, emails and videos. Based on the data, call-centre operators were suggested answers. It also monitored TV channels for words or subjects. The company saw rapid growth, landing a bunch of awards and recognition for him. In 2011, he was appointed to the government's council for science and technology. As part of it, he advised then prime minister David Cameron on AI development. He later established the tech investment firm Invoke Capital, which invested in the creation of British cyber security company Darktrace in 2013. He was on the board of the company till early this year.

Mike Lynch: the British 'Bill Gates' missing after yacht sinks off Sicily - VnExpress International

The 59-year-old businessman -- who was only acquitted weeks ago in the U.S. after facing massive fraud charges -- was reportedly with colleagues on board the luxury vessel moored off the coast of Porticello, east of Palermo. His wife, Angela Bacares, was among the 15 people rescued, but his daughter Hannah is among the six missing, Salvo Cocina, head of the Civil Protection Agency in Sicily, told AFP. Originally from Suffolk in east England, Lynch was a former advisor to two British prime ministers and once a star entrepreneur who seemed to represent a rare tech British success story. The businessman has a fortune of £500 million ($648 million) according to the latest Sunday Times "Rich List", and owes his fame to his software firm Autonomy which he sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011. He founded the company in 1996 in Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate, and turned it into a leading British tech firm. But just one year after the mega-deal, HP reported a write-down of $8.8 billion -- including more than $5 billion it attributed to inflated data from Autonomy -- plunging Lynch into a decade-long fraud scandal. Prosecutors accused him of taking part in a massive scheme as Autonomy's chief executive to deceive HP by pumping up his company's value before its sale. Last year, Lynch was extradited from Britain to the U.S. to stand trial, facing two decades in jail if convicted of the 17 charges and spending the year in house arrest. But in June he was acquitted on all charges. "I am looking forward to returning to the U.K. and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field," Lynch said after the verdict was handed down in a San Francisco court. Scapegoat? Lynch -- who made around $815 million from the Autonomy sale -- always denied the fraud charges, accusing HP of making him a scapegoat for its own failings. After returning to the U.K., Lynch told the Times newspaper in July that he had "various medical things that would have made it difficult to survive" in an American prison. Speaking about the verdict, Lynch had told the Times: "It's bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?" Father of two daughters aged 18 and 21, and a dog lover -- owning two dachshunds and four sheepdogs -- Lynch has a home in the affluent London district of Chelsea, according to the newspaper, as well as owning a farm in Suffolk. Despite the acquittal, the fraud case is not closed. In 2022, London's High Court ruled in a civil fraud case that HP had been duped and had overpaid for Autonomy. The court has yet to rule on the billions of dollars in damages claimed by the American group. Also sued by HP, Autonomy's former CFO Sushovan Hussain was found guilty of fraud in 2018 by a U.S. jury, with Hussain jailed for five years. The shadow of Lynch's legal troubles has long weighed on the share prices of another British company -- the cybersecurity and artificial intelligence group Darktrace of which he is a founding investor. But in a reversal of fortune, Darktrace accepted a $5.3 billion takeover offer from US private equity firm Thoma Bravo in April, sending its share price soaring. A spokeswoman for Lynch declined to comment when contacted by AFP on Monday.