EPAJonathan Bloomer, chief executive of Morgan Stanley International Bank, and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, are among six people missing after a luxury yacht sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily on Monday, Sicilian civil protection told the BBC.
British technology magnate Mike Lynch, 59, and his daughter Hannah, 18, were also reported missing after the incident about 700 m off the coast of the Mediterranean island.
There were 22 people on board the 56-meter-long Bayesian, including British, Americans and Canadians. 15 people were rescued, including a one-year-old British girl. The Sicilian Civil Protection also confirmed that the body of the ship’s cook had been recovered.
The yacht capsized at around 5:00 a.m. local time after a severe storm caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air.
The search was scheduled to resume at 06:30 local time (05:30 BST) on Tuesday, Italian newspaper La Reppublica reported.
The British-flagged yacht with ten crew members and twelve passengers sank on Monday near the port of Porticello, east of Sicily’s capital Palermo.
Witnesses told Italian news agency Ansa that the Bayesian’s anchor was down when the storm hit, causing the mast to break and the ship to lose its balance and sink.
The wreck lies on the seabed at a depth of 50 metres and divers are preparing to continue the search for the missing people.
PA MediaMike Lynch, one of the missing passengers, is known to some as “the British Bill Gates.”
He co-founded the software company Autonomy before selling it to American computer giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) for $11 billion (£8.6 billion) in 2011.
But after the spectacular takeover, Lynch was mired in a bitter legal battle for over a decade. In June, he was acquitted in the US of several fraud charges for which he had faced a prison sentence of two decades.
The yacht’s sinking occurred on the same day that the lawyer for Lynch’s co-defendant in the fraud case, Stephen Chamberlain, confirmed his death after he was hit by a car in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.
The registered owner of Bayesian is Revtom Ltd. The superyacht can accommodate up to 12 guests in six suites.
The name of the yacht is said to be based on Bayes’ theory, which was also the basis of Mr Lynch’s doctoral thesis.
Mr Lynch’s wife, Mrs Bacares, is listed as the sole owner of Revtom. The company is registered in the Isle of Man.
Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares was also one of the 15 rescued.
A British mother and her one-year-old daughter also survived.
The mother, known locally as Charlotte Golunski, later described how she held her baby above the sea surface to save them from drowning.
She told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that her family survived because she was on deck when the yacht sank.
She said they were awakened by “thunder, lightning and waves making our boat dance” and it felt like “the end of the world” before they were thrown into the water.
“I lost my daughter in the sea for two seconds, then I quickly hugged her amidst the raging waves,” the newspaper quoted her as saying.
Survivors said the trip was organised by Mr Lynch for his work colleagues.
First, a Dutch ship sailing nearby rescued survivors from the waves and cared for them until rescue workers arrived.
After the storm had passed, Captain Karsten Borner noticed that his crew and the yacht that had been behind them had disappeared.
“We saw a red flare, so my first mate and I went to the position and found this drifting life raft,” he told Reuters.
There were 15 survivors on board the life raft, three of whom were “seriously injured,” he said.
Eight of the rescued people are being treated in hospital, the Italian coast guard said.
The British Foreign Office said it was supporting a number of British citizens and their families following an incident in Sicily. The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch is also sending a team of inspectors to make a “preliminary assessment” of the sinking of the UK-registered boat.
