Bodies found in Bayesian wreckage confirmed as Mike Lynch and daughter

Divers recovered on Wednesday the bodies of Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah Lynch from the luxury yacht of the 59-year-old tech entrepreneur. The vessel had sunken off the coast of Sicily in the midst of a fierce storm on Monday, with 22 people on board.

Mr Lynch and his daughter were two of six people who this morning were still missing from the £30 million vessel. The body of the yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas, was recovered on Monday while the remaining 15 people had already been rescued. 

Two more bodies, not yet identified, were found in the wreckage on Wednesday, the head of the Sicilian civil protection Salvo Cocina said. He also told the Telegraph: “On behalf of myself and my colleagues, I would like to express my deepest sympathy to the families of the victims and express our condolences to them at this difficult time.”  

Once dubbed the “British Bill Gates“, Mr Lynch and his wife Angela Bacares were valued at £852m by the Sunday Times Rich List last year. However, he had been trying to move past a Silicon Valley debacle that had tarnished his legacy as an icon of British ingenuity.

He hit the jackpot when he sold Autonomy, a software maker he founded in 1996, to Hewlett-Packard for just under £8.5 billion ($11 billion) in 2011.

However, the deal quickly turned into an albatross for him after he was accused of cooking the books to make the sale and fired by HP’s then-CEO Meg Whitman.

A decade-long legal battle had resulted in his extradition from the UK to face criminal charges of engineering a massive fraud against HP.

Mr Lynch steadfastly denied any wrongdoing, claiming that he was being made a scapegoat for HP’s own mistakes – a position he maintained while testifying before a jury during a two-and-a-half-month trial in San Francisco earlier this year.

US Justice Department prosecutors called more than 30 witnesses in an attempt to prove allegations against Mr Lynch. The trial ended up exonerating Mr Lynch in June, who pledged to return to the UK and explore new ways to innovate. 

Although he avoided a possible prison sentence, Mr Lynch still faced a potentially huge bill stemming from the civil case in London that HP mostly won in 2022.

Damages have not yet been determined in that case, but HP is seeking £3billion ($4billion). Mr Lynch made more than £613million ($800million) from the Autonomy sale.

Before becoming entangled with HP, Mr Lynch was widely hailed as a visionary who inspired descriptions casting him as the British version of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

A Cambridge-educated mathematician, Mr Lynch made his mark running Autonomy, which made a search engine that could pore through emails and other internal business documents to help companies find vital information more quickly. Autonomy’s steady growth during its first decade resulted in Lynch being awarded an OBE in 2006. 

In the months leading up to the deal that would go awry, HP valued Autonomy at £35billion ($46billion), according to evidence presented at Lynch’s trial.

The trial also presented contrasting portraits of Lynch. Prosecutors painted him as an iron-fisted boss obsessed with hitting revenue targets, even if it meant resorting to duplicity.

But his lawyers cast him as an entrepreneur with integrity and a prototypical tech nerd who enjoyed eating cold pizza late at night while pondering new ways to innovate.

Neighbour Ruth Leigh today described Mr Lynch as a “very charitable man” who would speak at the village church on Remembrance Sunday.

Ms Leigh, of Pettistree in Suffolk, said: “You’d see him driving about and he’d always wave and say hello and use your name. Once a year he’d host a party on the lawn and we’d all go to it.

“He’s just a really nice person. I know that sounds a bit trite, but for a man in his position with every right he could have been quite lofty but he wasn’t, he got involved.

“He used to come and speak at the church in the village on Remembrance Sunday. He was a very charitable man, he gave a lot of his time and effort which was good. We just had an incredibly high opinion of him.”