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Tech entrepreneur and his daughter are among six presumed dead as divers struggle to access sunken superyacht.
The British co-founder of UK-based cyber security company Darktrace and enterprise software firm Autonomy is one of six presumed to have died after the superyacht they were aboard, Bayesian, sank off the coast of Sicily after it encountered a severe storm on 19 August.
The vessel was carrying 10 crew and 12 passengers, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares and daughter Hannah. While Bacares was among 15 rescued from the yacht, Hannah Lynch is also presumed dead.
Other presumed dead in the sinking are Jonathan Bloomer of Morgan Stanley and his wife Judy, and Chris Morvillo of the law firm Clifford Chance and his wife Neda.
Divers attempted to access the vessel a day after it sank but have so far been unable to access the cabins onboard, where the Italian coastguard believe the missing passengers to be.
“We do not exclude that they are not inside the boat, but we know the boat sank quickly. We suppose that the six people missing may not have had time to get out,” coastguard spokesperson Vincenzo Zagarola said to media.
Lynch was recently cleared of 15 counts of fraud in a US court over the 2011 sale of Autonomy – now known as HP Autonomy – to Hewlett Packard for US$11.1 billion. Lynch told the UK’s Sunday Times in July that he was pleased to have avoided a prison sentence.
“I have various medical things that would have made it very difficult to survive,” Lynch said.
“If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.”
Lynch founded Autonomy in 1996 and co-founded Darktrace in 2013 with several cyber security experts and mathematicians from a company he owned, Invoke Capital.
Private equity firm Thoma Bravo offered to take over Darktrace in April 2024 for US$5.3 billion.
Diving teams from the Italian firefighting service are continuing their efforts to access the yacht’s interior.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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