Divers seek Mike Lynch and Morgan Stanley chief after yacht sinks
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[August 20, 2024]
By Giselda Vagnoni
PALERMO, Sicily (Reuters) - Divers scoured the wreck of a luxury yacht
off Sicily's coast on Tuesday to find six missing people, including
British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and a Morgan Stanley executive,
following an intense storm that sank the vessel on Monday.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-metre-long (184-ft) superyacht, was
carrying 22 people and anchored off the port of Porticello when it was
hit by the fierce, pre-dawn storm.
Fifteen people escaped before it capsized and the body of one person who
died was swiftly recovered. That left six passengers unaccounted for -
Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Morgan Stanley International
chairman Jonathan Bloomer, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo, and
their two wives.
"The fear is that the bodies got trapped inside the vessel," which was
lying 49 meters (160 feet) deep, Salvatore Cocina, head of civil
protection in Sicily, told Reuters. This meant time beneath the waves
was a limiting factor for the divers.
"The biggest difficulty we have is due to the depth, which does not
allow long times of intervention," fire department diver Marco Tilotta
told reporters. "We plan ... to search centimeter by centimeter."
Tilotta said the vessel appeared to be intact and was lying on its right
side. Divers had not ascertained whether the 72-metre-long mast had
snapped somewhere along its length.
LYNCH TRIAL
Lynch, 59, is one of the UK's best-known tech entrepreneurs. He built
the country's largest software firm, Autonomy, from his ground-breaking
research at Cambridge University and became known as Britain's Bill
Gates.
He sold the firm to HP for $11 billion in 2011, after which the deal
spectacularly unraveled with the U.S. tech giant accusing him of fraud,
resulting in a lengthy trial. Lynch was eventually acquitted by a jury
in San Francisco in June.
Morvillo represented Lynch in the case, while Bloomer had appeared as a
character witness on his behalf.
In an apparent extraordinary coincidence, Stephen Chamberlain, Mike
Lynch's co-defendant in the trial, died after a road accident in Britain
over the weekend, his lawyer said on Monday.
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Rescue personnel operate on boats on the sea near the scene where a
luxury yacht sank, off the coast of Porticello, near the Sicilian
city of Palermo, Italy, August 20, 2024. REUTERS/Guglielmo
Mangiapane
The Bayesian was owned by Lynch's wife, who survived the disaster,
and other guests on the yacht included Lynch's colleagues. The only
body so far retrieved was that of the onboard chef Ricardo Thomas,
an Antiguan citizen.
The British government's Marine Accident Investigation Branch said
it sent four of its inspectors to Sicily to conduct a "preliminary
assessment."
'DIDN'T SEE IT COMING'
One expert at the scene of the disaster who declined to be named
said an early focus of the official investigation would be whether
the yacht's crew had closed access hatches into the vessel before
the storm struck.
Investigators would look at whether appropriate measures had been
taken, given the forecasts for bad weather overnight.
"We didn't see it coming," the captain of the yacht, James Catfield,
said of the storm, according to la Repubblica news website on
Monday.
Storms and heavy rains have ravaged Italy in recent days, after
weeks of scorching heat warmed the sea temperature to record highs,
raising the risk of extreme weather conditions, experts said.
"The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees
Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), which is almost 3 degrees more than
normal," said meteorologist Luca Mercalli.
"We can't say that this is all due to global warming but we can say
that it has an amplifying effect," he told Reuters.
(Writing by Crispian Balmer; Reporting by Alvise Armellini, Giulia
Segreti, Gavin Jones, William Schomberg and Sam Tobin; Editing by
Bernadette Baum)
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