Who is Mike Lynch, the British Bill Gates, who disappeared with his daughter in a sailboat sinking in Sicily?
Technology mogul Mike Lynch, dubbed the “British Bill Gates”, has disappeared along with five others after a luxury yacht sank off the Italian coast. The 56-metre sailboat, called the “Paisian” and flying the British flag, sank off the coast of Porticello, a coastal town about 15 kilometres east of Palermo, Sicily.
In the middle of the night, a violent wind and a real storm blew up on the coast. There were twelve passengers and ten crew members on board, most of them British citizens.
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The 59-year-old businessman, founder of software publishing company Autonomy, is one of Britain’s best-known tech entrepreneurs. He has advised two prime ministers and co-founded Autonomy in 1996, his greatest economic achievement. The company offered software that could extract useful information from phone calls, emails and videos. According to the Sunday Times Rich List 2024, Lynch’s fortune is estimated at around £600m.
In recent years, Mike Lynch has been the subject of much talk for his trial in a fraud case linked to the $11 billion sale of Autonomy software to US conglomerate HP in 2011, the largest takeover of a British company at the time.
His daughter is also missing.
HP accused Autonomy of falsifying its accounts, and in particular accused Mike Lynch of artificially inflating the company's reported revenues, sales growth and margins. According to HP, the company was worth “only” $8.8 billion. In 2023, he was extradited from the UK to the US to face trial in the case, but was acquitted in June after a trial in San Francisco.
His daughter Hannah is also missing, but his wife Angela Bacaris was rescued and taken to a local hospital with minor injuries.
More information about the shipwreck off the coast of Sicily
According to media reports, the sailboat, which was anchored about 700 metres off the port of Porticello, found itself in the path of a waterway, a phenomenon that has been increasingly observed in Europe in recent years. Of the 22 crew members, six are missing.
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