British entrepreneur Mike Lynch was among those missing when their superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily, multiple media outlets reported. His wife, Angela Baccares, was rescued.
The ship, called the Baysian, sank early Monday morning with 12 passengers and 10 crew on board after the $14 million vessel was caught in a storm near Palermo. One body has been recovered, but six people are still missing.
Sky News reported that most of the passengers were British and that the ship was at anchor at the time of the collision.
Lynch is a prominent figure in British business as the former CEO of Autonomy Corporation, which he founded and grew in the mid-1990s before being acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) in 2011 for $11 billion, a deal that led to Lynch being charged with 15 counts of fraud in the United States.
HP ultimately wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion after accusing the company of inflating sales and misleading investors.
Read more: What we know about the Baysian yacht tragedy that left one dead and six missing
In June of this year, after a 13-year legal battle, he was cleared of all charges in San Francisco.
This was a notable win, not just because of the size of the initial deal, but because, according to the Pew Research Center, only 0.4% of federal criminal cases in the United States went to trial and ended in an acquittal in fiscal year 2022. Only 12% of all wire fraud prosecutions resulted in an acquittal.
Ahead of his trial, Lynch was extradited to the United States and placed under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance.
Lynch, who was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2006 for services to enterprise, later became an investor in cybersecurity unicorn Darktrace (DARK.L), served on the boards of the BBC and the British Library, and founded Invoke Capital VC.
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