The superyacht of billionaire businessman Mike Lynch and his teenage daughter drowned off the coast of Sicily, and they were discovered dead. Investigations are still ongoing into the incident’s circumstances.
For British IT entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his family, what was meant to be a victorious sail into the sunset tragically changed into a terrible tragedy.
Search teams discovered the terrible object amid the wreckage of Lynch’s opulent superyacht, Bayesian, on August 21. Off the coast of Sicily, the ship capsized due to a rare and powerful “black swan” waterspout.
What was supposed to be a “victory trip” turned into an unfathomable loss when the Chief of Civil Protection reported that Lynch, also referred to as “Britain’s Bill Gates,” and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were among the four bodies discovered. On the submerged superyacht, Lynch and his daughter were discovered nestled between mattresses.
The 59-year-old businessman was not the only one who perished in the sea because he had just recently celebrated winning his US fraud trial over the $10.9 billion (£8.3 billion) sale of his IT company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard.
The identities of the two other bodies, a male and a woman, that were found in the master bedroom are still unknown. To make matters worse, a fifth corpse is still stuck in the submerged grave of the formerly magnificent ship.
Authorities are battling against time to find U.S. couple Chris and Neda Morvillo, as well as senior executive Jonathan Bloomer of Morgan Stanley and his wife Judy. The recovery of Recaldo Thomas, the chef at Bayesian, earlier on Monday added to the layers of this ongoing nautical tragedy.
Jim Dale, a meteorologist and former Royal Navy forecaster, explained how the waterspout affected Lynch’s vessel. Given the abundance of waterspouts in the vicinity, he claimed that the episode had “anaemology written all over it”.
Reports on the day of the incident revealed that there were approximately 19 waterspouts in the area, which made the situation extremely perilous. Dale thinks the captain of the yacht probably acted cautiously after getting weather alerts.
But it’s possible that they unintentionally put themselves in more danger by anchoring the ship at sea rather than in port. Additionally, he hypothesized that some survivors may have avoided the worst of the storm because they had received earlier warning signs.