Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, is among those missing after British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch’s yacht sank during a violent storm off the coast of Sicily, an Italian official said.
Salvatore Cocina, head of the civil protection agency in Sicily, said Bloomer and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer with the Clifford Chance law firm, were among the six missing. Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were also reported missing late Monday.
This update came after it was revealed that Lynch’s co-defendant in a US trial related to the sale of his software company to Hewlett-Packard had died in a car accident in England.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-metre-long sailing boat, had 22 people on board and was anchored just offshore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by a tornado in the early hours of Monday, the Italian coast guard said in an earlier statement.
The death of one man, believed to be the ship’s cook, was confirmed. The coast guard said the missing people were of British, American and Canadian nationality.
Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old girl who was rescued by her mother.
A spokesman for Lynch, co-founder of Autonomy, a software company that became one of the brightest stars of the British tech scene, declined to comment. Survivors said the trip was organised by Lynch for his work colleagues.
Lynch, once dubbed Britain’s Bill Gates, spent much of the past decade defending his name in court against fraud allegations related to the sale of his software company Autonomy to U.S. technology giant Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion.
The 59-year-old was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June after living under de facto house arrest for more than a year.
A few hours after the news of the ship’s sinking became known, it emerged that his co-defendant in the trial, Stephen Chamberlain, had died in a car accident while jogging in Cambridgeshire.
Chamberlain, the former vice president of finance at Autonomy, was hit by a car on Saturday morning and required a ventilator, Reuters reported. In a statement, Chamberlain’s attorney Gary Lincenberg said he died after being “fatally struck by a car” while jogging.
On Monday, rescue divers attempted to reach the hull of the Bayesian, which, according to the Italian Coast Guard, had a crew of ten and twelve passengers on board.
The boat had sunk to a depth of about 49 metres and the public prosecutor’s office in Termini Imerese was investigating the incident.
“The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not to this extent,” a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters.
The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters he turned on the engine as the wind picked up to maintain control of his vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian, which was anchored alongside him.
“We were able to keep the ship in position and when the storm was over we noticed that the ship behind us had gone,” Karsten Borner told reporters. The other boat “lay flat on the water and then sank,” he added.
He said his crew then found some of the survivors – including a little girl and her mother – on a life raft and brought them on board before the coast guard picked them up.
Eight of those rescued, including the one-year-old child, were taken to hospitals and were all in stable condition.
Domenico Cipolla, chief doctor at the Di Cristina hospital in Palermo, where the one-year-old girl and her mother were admitted, said: “The baby is fine. The mother is also fine, although with some minor abrasions. The father will also be discharged from the hospital soon.”
“They said that most of them were colleagues who worked for Lynch. They are deeply traumatized. As time goes by, they realize more and more that they lost many friends that morning.”
The New Zealand Foreign Ministry confirmed that two New Zealanders were on board the yacht.
New Zealand lawyer Ayla Ronald was named as one of the survivors. Her father, Lin Ronald, confirmed to the Guardian that his daughter was safe but shaken after the incident.
Ronald is employed by the international law firm Clifford Chance and worked on Lynch’s long-running fraud case in London, her father said.
Italy has been hit by storms and heavy rain in recent days after weeks of scorching heat sent temperatures in the Mediterranean to record levels, increasing the risk of extreme weather, experts say.
“The sea surface temperature around Sicily was about 30 degrees, almost three degrees more than normal. This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms,” said meteorologist Luca Mercalli.
“We cannot say that this is all due to global warming, but we can say that it has a reinforcing effect,” he told Reuters.
