U.K. tech tycoon Mike Lynch is missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily early Monday morning.
The yacht, which records suggest belonged to Lynch, sank after encountering a storm. There were 22 people, including 12 passengers and 10 crew members, on board. Of them, 15 have been rescued, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares. One body has been recovered.
While Lynch, 59, is not as well known in the U.S., in the U.K., he’s basically Bill Gates. Lynch is the founder and former chief executive of Autonomy, one of the world’s biggest software companies. The company grew out of Cambridge Dynamics, a fingerprint recognition firm he created in 1991.
Lynch sold the massively successful company to Hewlett Packard (HP) for $11 billion, which ended up earning him more than $800 million. But it also brought about a 13-year legal battle for the entrepreneur, who was accused of fraud and conspiracy leading up to Autonomy’s sale.
The prosecution argued that he artificially inflated the company’s numbers and that he had a history of mob-like intimidation. In the end, the businessman was cleared of the charges after his team was about to prove the case was essentially “a dispute over differences between U.K. and U.S. accounting systems” (in other words, one big misunderstanding).
Lynch was only just acquitted in June. At the time, he said in a statement that he was “elated” and “looking forward to returning to the U.K. and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.” But while he was thrilled for the legal battle to be over, he acknowledged how truly costly it was.
Not only was Lynch up against 20 years in prison, but he spent at least 13 months on house arrest. Shortly after his name was cleared, he told The Times about the crushing stress of potential jail time: “I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back.”
Lynch, who was raised by a mother who was a nurse and a father who was a firefighter, felt he could only fight the charges due to his financial position. “You shouldn’t need to have funds to protect yourself as a British citizen,” he told BBC radio. “The reason I’m sitting here, let’s be honest, is not only because I was innocent . . . but because I had enough money not to be swept away by a process that’s set up to sweep you away.”
Lynch also previously served on the Council for Science and Technology for the British government, and is a father of two.