Once dubbed the British “Bill Gates”, tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is among those missing since Monday after a superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily in a sudden storm.
The sinking came the same day as Lynch’s former close colleague and vice-president of finance at Autonomy, Stephen Chamberlain, also died in a freak coincidence having been hit by a car while out running.
59-year-old Lynch — who was only acquitted weeks ago in the US after facing massive fraud charges — was reportedly with colleagues on board the Bayesian superyacht 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.
Who is Mike Lynch?
Originally from Suffolk in east England, Lynch was a former advisor to two British prime ministers and was 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.
Lynch was a well-loved and admired tech pioneer, who inspired future generations to start their own companies in the U.K. and beyond.
“Mike was a UK tech leader who had a rare deep understanding of technology and an ability to commercialise it at scale. He found talent, supported that talent and helped them scale,” Brent Hoberman, entrepreneur and founder of Founders Forum and Lastminute.com, told Fortune.
Baroness Joanna Shields, a former managing director at Google and Facebook, told Fortune: “Mike saw possibilities before others could even conceive them — so often proven right as the world caught up with him and his ideas. He was finally free again to dream and invent, making his tragic passing all the more devastating for his family, our industry, and this country.”
Lynch founded Autonomy 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 and many of his colleagues into a decade-long fraud scandal.
Prosecutors accused him and others 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.
Autonomy’s former CFO Sushovan Hussain was found guilty of fraud in 2018 by a US jury, with Hussain jailed for five years.
In the case against Hussain prosecutors said he and his co-conspirators in defrauding HP had “an attitude that, like a James Bond villain or a Mafioso, they were above the law.”
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.
A bully or a 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.
Prosecutors meanwhile had painted the executive as a bully, forcing underlings to help him cook the books of Autonomy and tricking HP into paying billions of dollars.
After returning to the UK, Lynch told The Times 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.
Darktrace’s woes
The shadow of Lynch’s legal troubles has also long weighed on the share prices of another British company — the cybersecurity and artificial intelligence group Darktrace.
Darktrace was co-founded by Lynch and several Autonomy executives, including the recently deceased Stephen Chamberlain and Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain.
At one point half of Darktrace’s board and the majority of its top executives were former Autonomy employees, however, that number has fallen in recent years.
Darktrace CEO Poppy Gustafsson has been connected with Lynch since 2009 and previously worked as a corporate controller at HP Autonomy.
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.
