Mike Lynch, the British tech tycoon who sold his software startup to HP for £8.7 billion in 2011, is missing after the Bayesian yacht sank off the coast of Sicily.
The businessman made headlines in recent years after Hewlett Packard (HP) accused him of duping them into overpaying when they bought his firm Autonomy.
He is among seven people missing after the £14 million yacht sank after being hit by a violent storm at around 5am this morning.
He was extradited to the US last May for a trial that acquitted him on all 15 felony counts over the 11-billion dollar (£8.64 billion) purchase of his company.
Mr Lynch, 59, would have faced 25 years in prison if he was found guilty but he was acquitted just two months ago.
He had been awarded an OBE for services to enterprise in 2006, and later served on the government’s council for science and technology under David Cameron in 2011.
Born in Ireland, Mr Lynch grew up in Chelmsford, Essex with his mother, a nurse, and his father, who worked as a firefighter.
He went on to study physics, maths and biochemistry at Cambridge University, specialising in adaptive pattern recognition.
His doctoral thesis is thought to be one of the most widely-read pieces of research in the university’s library.
After university, he launched a few tech startups, including one that specialised in automatic number-plate, fingerprint and facial recognition software for the police.
Then in 1996 he started Autonomy, a software used by organisations to analyse huge swathes of data.
It partly owed its success to Bayesian inference, which was a statistical theory devised by the 18th-centory statiscian Thomas Bayes – the superyacht that sank was also called Bayesian.
Autonomy was almost an immediate business success and it floated in Brussels in 1998.
Its fast growth combined with the dotcom boom lead to its move to the London Stock Exchange. Autonomy then joined the FTSE 100 of top UK-listed companies.
While HP were impressed enough to pay $11bn for Autonomy in 2011, the US computing giant took an $8.8bn writedown on its acquisition just a year later, saying it had found ‘serious accounting improprieties’ at Mr Lynch’s company.
The tech entrepreneur has basically been involved in defending its reputation ever since.
In his first interview after being cleared, Mr Lynch told The Sunday Times: ‘I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone, because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back.
‘I have various medical things that would have made it difficult to survive.’
He reportedly told the paper that, if convicted, he was unlikely to live to see freedom because of his age and serious lung condition.
Describing the moment the verdicts were returned, he said: ‘When you hear that answer, you jump universes.
‘If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense.’
He told The Sunday Times that he wants the extradition treaty between the UK and US overhauled, and to fund a British equivalent to the Innocence project non-profit organisation that seeks to free those wrongly convicted.
‘It has to be wrong that a US prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England that the UK police do.
‘The system can sweep individuals away. There needs to be a contrarian possibility that’s saying, ‘right, the whole world thinks you’re guilty – but actually, was that a fair conviction?”‘
Police agreed to meet him around the corner from his Chelsea home when he was extradited, but once at Heathrow US marshals put him in the back row of a United Airlines flight in restraints, the paper reported.
Mr Lynch said: ‘It’s ridiculous. You’re in chains, even though, like, what are you going to do?’
Away from work, Mr Lynch is married to his wife Angela Bacares and the couple have two children together.
He tends to keep a lot of his personal life private.
A total of 15 people were rescued from the superyacht, but Mr Lynch was not among them.
The body of one man, believed to be the boat’s chef, was found near the boat on the sea bed around half a mile offshore from the Italian island’s largest city, Palermo.
Charlotte Golunski, a British mum who managed to save her one-year-old daughter as the yacht sank, said the passengers were employees and collaborators of a software company.
The missing people include four Brits, two Americans and a Canadian.
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