Jonathan Bloomer, Mike Lynch, and Four Others Missing After Yacht Sinks Off Sicily Coast
Jonathan Bloomer, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, is among those missing after a yacht carrying UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch sank off the coast of Sicily during a severe storm. Salvatore Cocina, the head of Sicily’s civil protection agency, confirmed that Bloomer, along with lawyer Chris Morvillo of Clifford Chance, are among the six individuals unaccounted for.
Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, are also missing. The yacht, named Bayesian and flying a British flag, was anchored near the port of Porticello when it was struck by a tornado in the early hours of Monday. The 56-meter sailboat was carrying 22 people at the time, according to the Italian coastguard.
Among the crew and passengers, 15 individuals were rescued, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the yacht, and a one-year-old girl who was saved by her mother. However, one man, believed to be the yacht’s chef, was confirmed dead. The missing individuals hold British, American, and Canadian nationalities.
The trip aboard the Bayesian was reportedly organized by Lynch for his work colleagues. Lynch, co-founder of the software firm Autonomy, has spent much of the past decade entangled in legal battles, defending himself against fraud allegations related to the $11 billion sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
In June, Lynch was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco after spending over a year effectively under house arrest. Adding to the tragic circumstances, it was revealed that Lynch’s co-defendant in the US trial, Stephen Chamberlain, recently died after being hit by a car while running in Cambridgeshire, England.
Chamberlain, the former vice-president of finance at Autonomy, was struck on Saturday morning and later died after being placed on life support. As of Monday, Italian rescue divers were still attempting to reach the hull of the Bayesian, which had sunk to a depth of approximately 49 meters.
The public prosecutor’s office in Termini Imerese has opened an investigation into the incident. According to a coast guard official in Palermo, the storm’s severity was unexpected, despite the forecast of bad weather. A captain of a nearby boat described how his crew managed to keep their vessel in position during the storm, but when it was over, they noticed the Bayesian had vanished.
He recounted that the yacht appeared to have “gone flat on the water, and then down.” After the storm, the captain’s crew found some of the survivors on a life raft, including a baby girl and her mother, who were later picked up by the coast guard. Eight of the rescued individuals, including the one-year-old, were taken to hospitals and were reported to be in stable condition.
A doctor at the Di Cristina hospital in Palermo, where the baby and her mother were treated, stated that both were doing well, with the mother suffering only minor abrasions. TheThere was a problem generating a response. Please try again later.
