U.S. Environmental Protection AgencyMorgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Movello were among the six missing after a luxury yacht sank in a storm off Sicily on Monday, Sicilian Civil Protection told the BBC. One of the people.
British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, 59, and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah are reportedly missing after the accident about 700m (2,300ft) off the coast of the Mediterranean island.
The 56m long Bayes was carrying 22 people, including Britons, Americans and Canadians. Fifteen people were rescued, including a one-year-old British girl. Sicilian Civil Protection also confirmed that the body of the ship’s cook had been found.
The storm triggered a waterspout or rotating air column, causing the yacht to capsize around 5:00 local time.
According to Italian newspaper La Reppublica, the search operation will restart at 06:30 local time on Tuesday (05:30 BST).
The British-flagged yacht sank on Monday near the port of Porticello, east of Sicily’s capital Palermo, with 10 crew members and 12 passengers on board.
Witnesses told Italy’s ANSA news agency that the Bayes’ anchor had fallen when the storm hit, causing the mast to break and the ship to lose balance and sink.
The wreckage is located at a depth of 50m, and divers are preparing to continue searching for the missing persons.
PA averageOne of the missing passengers, Mike Lynch, was dubbed by some as the “British Bill Gates.”
He co-founded software company Autonomy before selling it to US computing giant HP for $11bn (£8.6bn) in 2011.
But in the wake of the high-profile acquisition, a bitter legal battle has loomed over Mr. Lynch for more than a decade. In June, he was acquitted in the United States on multiple fraud charges for which he had previously faced twenty years in prison.
The yacht sank on the same day that Mr Lynch’s co-defendant in the fraud case, Stephen Chamberlain, was hit and killed by a car in Cambridgeshire on Saturday, his lawyer confirmed.
The registered owner of Bayesian is Revtom Ltd.
It is understood that the yacht’s name is based on Bayesian theory, on which Mr Lynch’s doctoral thesis was based.
Mr Lynch’s wife, Ms Bakares, was named as the sole legal owner of Revtom, which is registered in the Isle of Man.
Mr Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was one of 15 people rescued.
A British mother and her one-year-old daughter also survived.
The local mother, Charlotte Golunski, later described how she held her child on the surface of the sea To save her from drowning.
She told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that her family survived because they were on deck when the yacht sank.
She said they were woken up by “thunder, lightning and waves that made our boat dance” and it felt like “the end of the world” before they were thrown into the water.
The newspaper quoted her as saying: “I lost my daughter for two seconds in the ocean and then quickly hugged her in the crashing waves.”
Survivors said the trip was organized by Mr Lynch for his colleagues.
After the accident, a nearby Dutch-flagged vessel rescued survivors from the waves and cared for them until emergency services arrived.
After the storm passed, Captain Carsten Bonner said his crew noticed the yacht behind them disappeared.
“We saw the red flare, so my first officer and I went to that location and we found the life raft drifting,” he told Reuters.
There were 15 survivors on board the life raft, three of whom were “seriously injured,” he said.
The Italian Coast Guard said eight of those rescued were receiving treatment in hospital.
The Foreign Office said it was providing support to a number of British nationals and their families following the incident in Sicily. The British Marine Accident Investigation Branch also dispatched an inspection team to conduct a “preliminary assessment” of the sinking of the British-registered ship.
