He was sometimes called the “British Bill Gates” because he was one of the few successful entrepreneurs in the UK in new technologies. He had also been at the centre of a long legal saga, accused of a complex and large-scale accounting fraud, before winning, against all odds, his trial in June. Mike Lynch did not enjoy seeing his name cleared for long: on Monday 19 August, he was reported missing after his yacht sank off the coast of Sicily, following a violent tornado.
THE Bayesiana 56-metre superyacht flying the British flag, where the entrepreneur was travelling with twenty other people, one of whom died and five others are still missing, was caught in a storm around 5am, off Porticello, 15 kilometres east of Palermo, according to a statement from the Italian coastguard.
According to the national news agency ANSA, Mr Lynch was on board with other British citizens and nationals from New Zealand, Sri Lanka, France and Ireland. Some of the survivors, including a little girl, were taken to hospitals in Palermo. At the time of the sinking, the Sicilian shore was battered by strong winds and torrential rain, which translated into the waterspout that caused the accident, causing the vessel to sink. Bayesian at a depth of 49 meters.
Climatic phenomena of this nature, similar to small tornadoes, have been particularly frequent in recent days in Sicily, but also in central Italy and Sardinia.
One of the country's first fortunes
Mike Lynch's life changed dramatically on August 11, 2011, when Hewlett-Packard (HP) bought Autonomy, the company he had founded fifteen years earlier, for $11.7 billion (€10.5 billion). The large American group, made obsolete by the competition with its printers that didn't work well and its old computers, hoped to get back on its feet by betting on this company that provided software for managing huge databases, the ancestors of artificial intelligence.
Mr Lynch, who grew up in a modest family in east London before studying engineering at Cambridge, was now one of the richest people in the country, pocketing half a billion dollars for his 8% stake in his company.
One of the biggest accounting sagas of the past decade soon followed. HP was in trouble, and just weeks after acquiring Autonomy, its boss, Leo Apotheker, was fired, accused of overpaying for Mr. Lynch's company.
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Source: Lemonde
