The father of Kiwi lawyer Ayla Ronald says she's "very shaken" after being rescued from the ill-fated Bayesian off the coast of Sicily. Video / Vigil del Fueco / Gettyimages
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.
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.
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 the blue chip stocks on the British stock exchange before being sold to HP for more than £8 billion ($17b) in 2011.
Lynch used his wealth to become a founding investor in Darktrace, a cyber security 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 US$5 billion ($8b) fraud 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.
Last year, he was extradited from Britain to stand trial before a California court. He faced up to 25 years in prison.
Mike Lynch arrives at federal court in San Francisco, California, US. Photo / Getty Images
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 subject to a US$100m 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 11-and-a-half-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.
Stephen Chamberlain, Mike Lynch’s co-defendant and former Autonomy executive, was hit by a car and killed while out running in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.
Chamberlain was acquitted in the US alongside Lynch two months ago
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.
Over the weekend, Lynch was aboard his personal yacht off the coast of Sicily. The boat, Bayesian, was named for the branch of statistics which was the subject of Lynch’s Cambridge PhD.
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 Ms 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”.
Few days ago we encountered the exquisite Bayesian vessel,anchored near us. All night until sunrise we took plenty of picts of it. The 75-meter mast illuminated at night was spectacular. We speculated about the individuals on board,enjoying the time of their lives. What a tragedy pic.twitter.com/OqYIwaV1vb
There it was reportedly 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.
His personal net worth was estimated at $450m 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?”
