Mike Lynch, the British tech tycoon who sold his software startup to HP for £8.7bn in 2011, is missing after his Bayesian yacht sank off the coast of Sicily.
The businessman made headlines in recent years when he accused Hewlett-Packard (HP) of misusing his company’s Autonomy acquisition.
He is one of seven people who went missing when the £14m yacht sank in a severe storm at about 5am this morning.
Last May, he was extradited to the US, where he was acquitted of all 15 charges related to his company’s $11bn (£8.64bn) acquisition.
If convicted, Lynch, 59, faces 25 years in prison. However, he had been acquitted just two months earlier.
He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2006 for his contributions to business, and served on the Government Science and Technology Council under David Cameron in 2011.
Born in Ireland, Lynch grew up in Chelmsford, Essex, with his mother a nurse and his father a firefighter.
He then studied physics, mathematics and biochemistry at Cambridge University, specialising in adaptive pattern recognition.
His doctoral thesis is considered one of the most read research papers in the university library.
After his studies, he founded several technology start-ups, including one specialising in automatic number plate, fingerprint and facial recognition software for police.
In 1996, he founded Autonomy, software used by companies to analyze vast amounts of data.
Part of this success was due to Bayesian inference, a statistical theory developed in the 18th century by statistician Thomas Bayes. A sunken superyacht was also named Bayesian inference.
Autonomy was an almost immediate commercial success, and listed on the Brussels Stock Exchange in 1998.
The company’s rapid growth, coupled with the dot-com boom, led to a move to the London Stock Exchange. Autonomy subsequently became part of the FTSE 100, the UK’s largest listed company.
HP was so impressed that it paid $11 billion for Autonomy in 2011, but just a year later, the US computer giant had to take a $8.8 billion write-down on the acquisition, as Lynch’s company was identified.
Since then, the technology entrepreneur has essentially been busy defending the company’s reputation.
In his first interview since his exoneration, Lynch told The Sunday Times: “I had a lot of different medical problems that would have made it difficult for me to survive.
He described the moment of his sentencing as follows: “When you hear that answer, you feel like you’ve jumped through space.”
“If it had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as far as I know.”
He told The Sunday Times he would like to see the UK-US extradition treaty amended and to fund an equivalent of the Innocence Project, a British charity that seeks the release of wrongly convicted people.
“It would be wrong to say that US prosecutors have more power over British people living in the UK than the UK police. The system can easily remove individuals.
We need an alternative to say, ‘Okay, the whole world thinks you’re guilty, but was that actually a fair sentence?'” Police delivered him around the corner from his Chelsea home and agreed to a meeting.
But at Heathrow Airport, US marshals shackled him to the back row of a United Airlines plane, the paper reported. “It’s absurd,” Lynch said. You’re in chains thinking, “What should I do?”
Outside of work, Mr Lynch is married to his wife, Angela Bacalez, and the couple have two children.
He tends to keep his personal life mostly private.
A total of 15 people were rescued from the superyacht, but Mr Lynch was not among them.
The body of a man believed to be the ship’s cook was found near the ship on the seabed, about half a mile off the coast of Palermo, the largest city on the Italian island.
Charlotte Goranski, a British mother who rescued her one-year-old daughter when the yacht sank, said the passengers were employees and staff of a software company.
Among the missing are four Britons, two Americans and one Canadian.
