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The luxury yacht tragedy comes just months after Mike Lynch was cleared of all fraud charges after a long legal battle with US prosecutors.
Mike Lynch, the ‘British Bill Gates’ tech billionaire behind the Autonomy start-up, is one of six tourists missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily.
The luxury vessel called the Bayesian was carrying 22 people – including 10 crew – when a heavy storm created waterspouts, rotating columns of air and mist. The intensity of the storm caused the ship to sink.
Thankfully 15 people have been rescued, but one body has been recovered and six people are still missing, including Lynch. The search for these six people is ongoing.
Of Irish descent, Lynch is a co-founder of Autonomy, a UK start-up software platform that searched and organised complex data such as emails and phone calls. Lynch negotiated a sale of Autonomy to HP in 2011 for $11bn.
The sale was a major financial success for Lynch as it generated more than $800m for the tech tycoon, RTÉ reports. But it also led to a series of major legal battles that Lynch only walked away from earlier this year.
Around a year after the deal, HP wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8bn and attributed $5bn of this drop to “accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations”. HP went on to sue Lynch and former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain for this $5bn drop.
HP argued that Autonomy had misrepresented its finances, but Lynch denied the allegations. The tech tycoon became embroiled in legal battles with US authorities for many years, including being subject to what his lawyers call a “protracted and unfair” extradition process to the US – one that he fought hard to avoid.
The potential charges were significant – Lynch faced more than 20 years in prison if convicted. HP won a civil fraud case against Lynch in 2022 in the UK. But after a 12-week trial in San Francisco that ended in June, Lynch was found not guilty on all 15 counts of fraud and conspiracy charges brought by US prosecutors.
Autonomy’s former CFO Hussain was not so lucky, as he was given a five-year prison sentence for fraud in relation to the HP deal in 2019.
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