Missing tech multimillionaire is known as Britain’s Bill Gates

Just weeks ago, Mike Lynch was walking out of a San Francisco courtroom a free man with tears in his eyes.

The technology tycoon known as Britain’s Bill Gates had improbably beaten the odds in a bitter US legal dispute with technology giant HP, convincing a jury that he was not guilty of claims of massive fraud.

Mike Lynch is one of Britain’s best-known and most controversial technology entrepreneurs.Credit: Bloomberg

Cleared after a 13-year legal fight, the entrepreneur vowed to fight to reform Britain’s extradition laws after he was flown to San Francisco to face trial and kept under house arrest.

Yet tragedy has now struck the 59-year-old so soon after his victory. Lynch and his daughter are missing after his yacht sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning.

The 56-metre Bayesian sank to the seabed off the coast of Palermo after locals reported a freak tornado.

Angela Bacares, Lynch’s wife, was also on board and is reported to have been among 15 passengers rescued.

Searches continued for four Britons, a Canadian and two Americans, the coast guard said. One dead body has been found.

Lynch is one of Britain’s best-known and most controversial technology entrepreneurs.

Rise to the top

Born to an Irish immigrant family and raised in London in the 1960s, Lynch had a modest upbringing but won a scholarship to the private Bancroft’s School aged 11.

He went on to graduate from Cambridge University and subsequently founded the business that would make his name: Autonomy. The software company, set up in 1996, used complex statistical analysis to help businesses manage their data.

Autonomy grew rapidly and joined the ranks of Britain’s blue chips on the FTSE 100 before being sold to HP for more than £8 billion in 2011.

Lynch used his wealth to become a founding investor in Darktrace, the FTSE 100 cybersecurity company, and set up venture capital firm Invoke Capital to back other start-ups. His successes once led him to be lauded as “Britain’s Bill Gates”.

For 13 years, however, Lynch was dogged by claims that his success was built on the back of fraud. HP wrote off much of the value of Autonomy shortly after acquiring the business and accused Lynch of exaggerating the business’s success to get HP to overpay.

In 2022, Lynch lost a $US5 billion ($7.4 billion) fraud civil dispute against HP in the British High Court over the sale, and was later charged with multiple counts of criminal fraud by the US government for his alleged role.

Against the odds

Last year, he was extradited from Britain to stand trial before a California court. He faced up to 25 years in prison.

In the run-up to the trial, the entrepreneur spent months under house arrest with constant monitoring by an armed security detail. Lynch was forced to wear a GPS tag and was subject to a $US100 million bail bond.

Few observers gave Lynch much hope of beating the charges, given the high conviction rate in such cases. The US government had spent years and large amounts of money to prove Lynch had masterminded a scheme to artificially inflate the revenues of Autonomy.

But on June 7, after an 11½-week trial, Lynch was acquitted and walked from court a free man – a remarkable moment of vindication for the technologist who had always denied wrongdoing.

In a last-minute gambit, Lynch had taken to the witness stand to defend his record, denying he had been the “driving force” behind the complex fraud. He told the jury that while he had been in charge of the technological vision, he was not involved in the minutiae of the company’s accounting.

The high-risk defence paid off and Lynch was acquitted by the jury after three days of deliberation. Moments after he was declared not guilty to each of the 15 charges, his wife rushed over to embrace him.

“I am elated with today’s verdict and grateful to the jury for their attention to the facts over the last 10 weeks,” Lynch said at the time.

“My deepest thanks go to my legal team for their tireless work on my behalf. I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.”

Having returned to the UK, Lynch was preparing to campaign against what he viewed as Britain’s one-sided extradition treaty with the US.

In 2023, he had been escorted from his country home in handcuffs to a waiting plane and spirited across the Atlantic after then-home secretary Priti Patel signed off on his extradition. This was despite the UK’s Serious Fraud Office dropping a case against him years earlier.

“The system can sweep individuals away,” he said in a recent interview.

Tragedy

At the weekend, Lynch was aboard his personal yacht off the coast of Sicily. The boat, Bayesian, was named for the branch of statistics that was the subject of Lynch’s Cambridge PhD.

In 2022, Lynch lost a $US5 billion fraud civil dispute against HP in the British High Court over the sale and was later charged with multiple counts of criminal fraud by the US government for his alleged role.Credit: Bloomberg

Built in 2008, the 56-metre, 473-tonne superyacht is reported to have had capacity for 12 guests and 10 crew members, with a top speed of 12 knots. Its listed owner is Bacares, Lynch’s wife.

On board with the couple were Charlotte Golunski, a partner at Invoke Capital, and her husband, James Emsley. Others on the vessel are reported to include business associates and legal advisers to Lynch, as well as the ship’s crew.

Golunski, who was rescued from the vessel with her husband and baby daughter, told Italy’s Corriere Della Sera newspaper they were “all guests of our boss”, who she described as an “extraordinary person”.

The vessel was reported to have travelled from Aeolian Islands to Milazzo and Cefalù before arriving at Palermo.

There it was reported to have been hit by a freak storm, described by local fisherman as a tornado. Fifteen passengers were reportedly rescued by Italy’s coast guard helicopters. Six people are still missing.

A local fisherman told Corriere Della Sera: “At about 3:55 we saw the whirlwind. A quarter of an hour later, we saw a rocket 500 metres from the dock. At about 4:35 we went out to sea to provide assistance, but we only saw the remains of the vessel floating.

“There were no men in the sea. So we immediately called the port authority.”

Lynch and Bacares have two daughters, aged 18 and 21, students at Oxford and Imperial College London respectively. His younger daughter, Hannah, is understood to be among those missing after the superyacht sank.

Lynch’s personal net worth was estimated at $US450 million ($668 million) by his US lawyers last year, although a lot of the couple’s wealth is held by Bacares.

Lynch owns a home in west London but lived primarily at a farm in Suffolk, where he raised rare breeds of pigs and cows.

He had suffered from health issues including a lung condition for much of the past few years.

Last month he told a newspaper in his first interview since being found not guilty: “Now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?”

Telegraph, London

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