Bayesian yacht victim Mike Lynch was controversial but brilliant tech magnate

Recently acquitted 'Bill Gates of UK' had fought wire fraud charges in California in a long-running legal battle with Hewlett-Packard

British entrepreneur Mike Lynch has gone missing off the coast of Sicily. Reuters

Sometimes described as the Bill Gates of Britain, Mike Lynch was missing after an award-winning yacht sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily early on Monday.

Born in the Essex town of Ilford to Irish parents, his father a fireman and his mother a nurse, Mr Lynch was one of the UK's most controversial business figures in recent years.

Last year's Sunday Times Rich List calculated that he and his wife, Angela Bacares, were worth £852 million.

Ms Bacares, 57, was among those rescued by Italian coastguard on Monday.

On Thursday, Italian coastguard officials officially identified Mr Lynch's body but said his 18-year-old daughter was still missing.

Mr Lynch had recently been cleared of wire fraud charges in California, following his extradition from Britain to the US last year.

Bayesian yacht sinks off Sicily – in pictures

The 59-year-old was acquitted in a San Francisco court in early June, having been accused of involvement in an $11.1 billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) more than a decade earlier.

That sale happened in 2011, and within a year HP executives were crying foul and accusing Autonomy of shady accounting practices. But while HP had to write down the value of the deal by more than $5 billion, Mr Lynch maintained his innocence.

The UK's Serious Fraud Office looked into the case and in January 2015 said that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with some parts of the case and handed the rest over to the US authorities.

As such, by early 2018 Autonomy's former chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, had been found guilty of fraud in the US and sentenced to five years in prison.

The US Department of Justice charged Mr Lynch with 17 counts of fraud and conspiracy in 2018 and 2019, claiming he had been at the wheel during an illegal effort to overinflate the true state of Autonomy’s revenue.

In 2019, HP launched a civil case against Mr Lynch in the UK, which came to a conclusion in 2022, with the judge finding in favour of HP, but saying the damages involved would be substantially less than $5 billion.

Extradition to the US

The judgment, however, opened the door to extradition proceedings, which began in February 2022 and led to Mr Lynch being extradited to California the following year. He was confined to a house in San Francisco while he awaited trial after posting a $100 million bond.

Alongside Mr Lynch, the former vice president of finance at Autonomy, Stephen Chamberlain, was also indicted, extradited and put on trial in the US on the same charges.

Following the sinking of the yacht Mr Lynch was aboard off the coast of Italy, it emerged that Mr Chamberlain had died two days earlier having been involved in a road accident in Cambridgeshire, England.

Italian officials also confirmed that Jonathan Bloomer, 70, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, was among those who died after going missing off the coast of Sicily.

A friend of Mr Lynch, Mr Bloomer had been celebrating the acquittal on the yacht when the fatal storm struck.

Mr Bloomer joined the board of the insurance giant Hiscox as non-executive chairman last year, and had appeared as a defence witness in Mr Lynch's legal battle with Hewlett-Packard.

Following his acquittal in early June this year, Mr Lynch was highly critical of his prosecution in the US.

In an interview with the BBC, he said fewer than one per cent of US federal cases like his end in acquittal and that he was free because he had “enough money not to be swept away by a process that's set up to sweep you away”.

“You shouldn't need to have funds to protect yourself as a British citizen”, he added.

Had Mr Lynch been convicted in the US, he faced spending the rest of his life in prison.

“I have various medical things that would have made it difficult to survive,” he told The Times after his acquittal and return to the UK.

“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life,” he said, “the question is, what do you want to do with it?”

Exactly what that was will now not be known, but immediately following his release in the US in early June he told reporters that he was looking forward to getting back to his family and “innovating in my field”.

Second act

No doubt this would have pioneering work in the technology sector, probably in artificial intelligence (AI), given his involvement with the legal AI company, Luminance, and the cybersecurity firm, Darktrace.

Mr Lynch was also planning to challenge the extradition treaty that led to him being led from his Suffolk home in handcuffs to a courtroom in California.

The treaty, which was updated in 2003 to give more strength to prosecutors wishing to extradite suspects from each other's territory, was used against David Bermingham, one of the so-called NatWest Three linked to the Enron scandal, who sentenced to 37 months in prison in 2008.

Mr Lynch told The Times the treaty needed serious revamping and that he was going to put money into creating a British organisation similar to the Innocence Project in the US, which seeks to free those wrongly convicted.

“It has to be wrong that a US prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England than the UK police do,” he said.

Computer pioneer

Many described Mr Lynch as a pioneer of artificial intelligence, as his doctoral thesis at Cambridge University concerned neural networks, an early form of machine learning.

He set up companies at the cutting edge of software technology in the late 1980s, including one which specialised in the early development of fingerprint recognition technology. By 1996 he had started Autonomy, which went on to become a significant force in the British IT industry within just a few years.

Much of the way Autonomy's software worked was based on the statistical methodology of Bayesian inference, which is related to early internet search engines.

The yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily that Mr Lynch and his wife were thought to have owned through a company in the Isle of Man was called “Bayesian”.

During the time of his legal battles, he also cofounded Darktrace, which was eventually taken over in April this year when US private equity firm Thoma Bravo bought it out in a £4.2 billion takeover deal.

Mr Lynch had argued that the controversies surrounding him had depressed Darktrace's share price to make it a takeover target.

After leaving Autonomy in 2012, Mr Chamberlain also worked as the chief operating officer (COO) at Darktrace.

His interests listed in Who's Who include jazz saxophone and preserving rare breeds of animals. He received an OBE in 2006 and is a fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society. He had also served on the boards of the BBC and the British Library.