Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer is among those missing after a yacht carrying UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm, an Italian official has said.
Salvatore Cocina, head of the civil protection agency in Sicily, said Bloomer and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, were among the six people missing. Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were also unaccounted for as of late Monday.
The update came as it was reported that Lynch’s co-defendant in a US trial related to the sale of his software company to Hewlett-Packard had died after being hit by a car in England.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-metre sailboat, was carrying 22 people and anchored just off shore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by a tornado in the early hours of Monday morning, the Italian coastguard said in an earlier statement.
One man, understood to be the vessel’s chef, was confirmed dead. The coastguard said the missing had British, American and Canadian nationalities.
Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old girl who was saved by her mother.
A spokesperson for Lynch, the co-founder of Autonomy, a software firm that became one of the shining lights of the UK tech scene, declined to comment. Survivors said the trip had been organised by Lynch for his work colleagues.
Once described as Britain’s Bill Gates, Lynch spent much of the last decade in court defending his name against allegations of fraud related to the sale of his software firm, Autonomy, to the US tech company Hewlett-Packard for $11bn.
The 59-year-old was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June, after he had spent more than a year living in effect under house arrest.
Hours after news of the sinking broke it emerged that his co-defendant at that trial, Stephen Chamberlain, had died after being hit by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire.
Chamberlain, the former vice-president of finance at Autonomy, was hit on Saturday morning and had been placed on life support, Reuters reported. In a statement Chamberlain’s lawyer, Gary Lincenberg, said he had died after being “fatally struck” by a car while out running.
On Monday, rescue divers were trying to reach the hull of Bayesian, which was carrying a crew of 10 people and 12 passengers, according to the Italian coast guard.
The boat had sunk to approximately 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 of this magnitude,” a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters.
The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters that when the winds surged, he had turned on the engine to keep control of his vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian, which had been anchored alongside him.
“We managed to keep the ship in position and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone,” Karsten Borner told journalists. The other boat “went flat on the water, and then down,” he added.
He said his crew then found some of the survivors on a life raft – including a baby girl and her mother – and took them on board before the coast guard picked them up.
Eight of those rescued, including the one-year-old, were transferred to hospitals and were all in a stable condition.
Domenico Cipolla, a chief physician at the Di Cristina hospital in Palermo where the one-year-old girl and her mother were admitted, said: “The baby is doing well. The mother is also in good condition, albeit with some minor abrasions. The father will also be discharged from the hospital soon.
“They have said that most of them were colleagues who worked for Lynch. They are deeply traumatised. As time passes, they realise more and more that this morning they lost many friends.”
New Zealand’s ministry of foreign affairs confirmed 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 his daughter was safe but shaken after the event.
Ronald is employed at international law firm Clifford Chance, and had been working in London on Lynch’s long-running fraud case, her father said.
Storms and heavy rainfall have swept down Italy in recent days after weeks of scorching heat, which had lifted the temperature of the Mediterranean sea to record levels, raising the risk of extreme weather conditions, experts said.
“The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30C (86F), which is almost 3 degrees more than normal. This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms,” said meteorologist Luca Mercalli.
“We can’t say that this is all due to global warming but we can say that it has an amplifying effect,” he told Reuters.