Sinking of a super-sailing boat in Sicily: nicknamed “the British Bill Gates”, who is Mike Lynch, missing tech entrepreneur ?

Mike Lynch fait partie des disparus. MAXPPP – Yui Mok

Seven people are missing after a luxury yacht sank overnight from Sunday to Monday. Among them is British entrepreneur Mike Lynch.

British tech tycoon Mike Lynch is one of six people missing after a luxury superyacht sank with 22 passengers and crew on board, caught in a storm, overnight from Sunday to Monday near Palermo, in southern Italy.

Twelve passengers and ten crew members were on board the yacht, most of them British. Among them was tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, nicknamed “the British Bill Gates”, who is missing, the director of Sicilian Civil Protection, Salvo Cocina, told AFP.

The 59-year-old businessman, founder of software publisher Autonomy, is one of the most famous British tech entrepreneurs. His daughter Hannah is also missing but his wife Angela Bacares was rescued and taken to a local hospital with minor injuries, an AFP correspondent noted.

Extradited from the United Kingdom

In recent years, Mike Lynch has been most known for his trial in a fraud case linked to the sale of Autonomy software to the American group HP for $11 billion in 2011.

HP had accused Autonomy of having rigged its accounts, accusing Mike Lynch in particular of having artificially inflated declared revenues, the growth of turnover and margins of the company.

In 2023, he was extradited from the United Kingdom to the United States to stand trial in the case but was acquitted in June after a trial in San Francisco.