THE SEARCH IS continuing for British tech entrepeneur Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, and four others off the coast of Sicily today.

Lynch’s yacht, the Bayesian, sank during intense storms near Palermo over the weekend. 

Twenty-two people are believed to have been aboard the vessel, with 15 survivors saved from a liferaft yesterday. One body, believed to be that of the vessel’s chef, has been recovered.

Lynch had taken the trip with his daughter, Hannah, as well as Morgan Stanley International Bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo, to celebrate his acquittal in the US for fraud after an eleven year legal battle, according to the Financial Times.

Son of Irish emigrants

Lynch, originally from Essex, is the son of Irish emigrants to the UK, who are reported to have worked as a nurse and a fireman.

After studying physics, mathematics, and biochemistry at Cambridge University, he specialised in adaptive pattern recognition, a field which his most famous startup specialised in.

His yacht, the Bayesian, is named after the 18th-century statistician Thomas Bale, whose work helped to inspire Lynch in his own field.

Lynch’s mother hailed from Treacy Park in Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary where locals told The Journal today that Mike has always been someone who “identified with the town”, having spent several summers in Carrick as a youngster.

He took a close interest as an adult in the town, where he is understood to have provided support and consultation to businesses trying to attract inward private investment and state funding to the area.

Entrepreneur 

In 1996, in Cambridge in the UK, he was one of the founders of Autonomy, an enterprise software company. The company operated in the realm of knowledge management, when the amount of data available to companies was massively increasing.

Autonomy developed programmes which allowed companies to catalogue and search through all of its internal data – essentially an internal search engine.

In 2006, he was granted an OBE for his service to technology. He was appointed a non-executive director of the BBC in 2007, as well as acting as a tech advisor to then UK prime minister David Cameron from 2014 onwards.

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In 2011, Autonomy was sold to US technology giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) for $11 billion. However, a year later, HP brought proceedings against Lynch in the UK for what it said was his falsely inflating the value of the company, causing HP to overpay by approximately $4 billion.

Court case

In 2019, Autonomy’s former chief financial office, Sushovan Hussain was sentenced to five years in prison for fraud. In 2022, a UK court ruled against Lynch in a civil case brought by HP.

In May 2023, he was extradited to the US to stand trial in California, and kept under house arrest.

Last month a jury delivered a unanimous verdict of not guilty.

One of Lynch’s co-defendants, Stephen Chamberlain, was killed on Monday after being struck by a car.