It should be noted that Mr. Lynch was a legend in British tech circles. The media called him “England’s Bill Gates” and his friends called him “titan pioneer” and “polymath”. in 2011 he sold his software company Autonomy to tech giant Hewlett Packard (HP) for a staggering $11 billion. dollar amount.
A dispute soon followed: HP complained that Lynch had artificially inflated the company’s value and accused him of fraud.
The case occupied the courts for 13 years. Mr. Lynch was recently threatened with up to 25 years in prison in the United States. In June, San Francisco judges acquitted Lynch and his co-defendant, former Autonomy CFO Stephen Chamberlain, 52.
Mr Lynch said with relief that he would now be taking a “long holiday”. He took his closest colleagues aboard his superyacht.
Liparis. Stromboli. Milac. They spent the last few days sailing around the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily until they dropped anchor off Porticello. A storm was on the horizon.
The element of water, which at 4:10 a.m. hit the deck in the morning, caught the ship completely by surprise. “We overlooked it,” Captain James Cutfield, 51, said when questioned by police the day after the sinking.
Video from a port surveillance camera shows the mast bending and the ship tilting to the side. Then the water masses swallow the image. The yacht was supposed to capsize, fill with water and disappear under water within minutes.
15 people, including a baby, got into the life raft. Mr. Lynch failed.
Recaldo Thomas, the ship’s cook, was the first to be found near the wreck. Divers recovered Mr Lynch’s body just days later at a depth of 49 metres, along with the bodies of Chris Morvill and his wife Neda and Jonathan and Judy Bloomer.
Morvillo was Mr Lynch’s lawyer in the HP case. Mr. Bloomer, chairman of the board of investment bank Morgan Stanley International, testified in his favor.
They all drowned in their cabins, as did Mike Lynch’s daughter Hannah, 18.
It is not yet clear what caused the 56-meter-long luxury yacht to capsize. The yacht was “absolutely safe,” its designer Giovanni Costantino hastened to assure the Financial Times. He had never seen a ship sink so quickly before, said German sailor Karsten Börner, 69, who gathered the survivors: “In a few minutes everything was gone.”
A ship that is basically unsinkable and disappears in minutes? A few men on board celebrate a great victory before? Sometimes fate is a strange bird, Bild writes.
The entry hatch was open, it was said after the first dives to the wreck. This is not yet confirmed. Is this how the masses of water penetrated, causing the ship to sink too quickly?
It is also possible that the movable keel was not fully extended: at a maximum depth of ten meters, it would have been an important counterweight to the 75-meter-long mast, which caused the ship to sway in a storm.
It is also possible that the crew were preparing for emergency measures and were surprised by the sheer force and volume of the water surge.
Such an event is called a “black swan” in economics because it is very rare: unlikely, unexpected, with huge consequences, in this case fatal.
The accident investigation will take several months. Now the captain of the yacht is being investigated for involuntary manslaughter.
While Mr. Lynch and his daughter and friends were being transported ashore in body bags, the news spread from the United States: his associate, also accused in the HP case, Stephen Chamberlain, was also found dead. He was hit by a car while running.
2024-08-28 07:19:31