Tech Entrepreneur Mike Lynch Among 6 Missing After Yacht Sinks Off Sicily

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Tech Entrepreneur Mike ****** Among 6 Missing After Yacht Sinks Off Sicily

One person was ******* and six people, including a British software mogul, were missing on Monday after a sailing yacht carrying 22 people sank during

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

off the coast of Sicily, Italian officials said.

The yacht sank after a storm “with strong winds” struck around 5 a.m., according to Luciano Pischedda, the Italian Coast Guard official overseeing the rescue operations. The vessel had been anchored about a half-mile off Porticello, about 12 miles east of the Sicilian capital, Palermo.

Camper & Nicholsons, managers of the sailing yacht, said in an emailed statement that there were 12 guests and 10 crew onboard.

The authorities have yet to determine what caused the yacht to sink. “This will be ascertained later,” Mr. Pischedda said, adding that several crew members were in the hospital and had not spoken to investigators.

Among the ***** and missing, four were British, two were *********, and one was a man with dual citizenship from Canada and Antigua, he said.

Among those unaccounted for is Mike ******, a British software mogul who was acquitted in the ******* States in June of ******, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

His wife, Angela Bacares, was rescued. Mr. ******, who once was described as Britain’s Bill Gates, had fought for more than a decade against accusations that he had defrauded Hewlett-Packard when he sold it his company, Autonomy, for $11 billion. The legal battle represented one of the biggest ****** cases in Silicon Valley history.

The ***** person has yet to be identified, and it was not immediately clear whether the ***** and missing were crew members, passengers or a combination of the two.

A passenger ship sailing under the flag of the Netherlands, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, anchored nearby, provided immediate assistance to the 15 surviving passengers, Mr. Pischedda said.

The coast guard brought the survivors to shore. On Monday morning, four coast guard ships and a helicopter were at the scene.

Italy’s firefighter corps said that their divers had started carrying out a search and rescue mission at dawn.

Luca Cari, a spokesman for the firefighters, said in a telephone interview that expert divers were on the way from Naples and Sassari, Sardinia, to search the vessel, which was about 165 feet underwater.

Operations at that depth, were “complicated,” he said, and required specialized divers.

Fabio Cefalù, a fisherman in Porticello, told the Italian newspaper

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

that he saw a waterspout — a sort of mini-tornado — that lasted “about 12 minutes” off the shore of Porticello shortly before 4 a.m.

Around 4:10, he said he saw a red flare go off “about 500 meters from the shore.” He said he waited for the weather to calm down, and went out about 20 minutes later to the site where the flare had gone off.

“We found only the cushions, and a few planks” floating in the water, he told the newspaper. There was no sign of the ship, and he immediately called the coast guard.

The boat, identified by Italian officials as the Bayesian, is an Italian-made 56-meter-long sailing yacht first launched in 2008, according to the website

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, which tracks ships. It sails under the flag of Britain. It was built by Perini Navi, an Italian luxury yacht maker.

Eight of the 15 passengers who were rescued were taken to hospitals in Palermo, the coast guard said. Camper & Nicholsons, the managers of the yacht, said its priority was to “provide all necessary support to the rescued passengers and crew.”

The youngest passenger onboard, a 1-year-old girl named Sophie, was taken to the Di Cristina hospital in Palermo with her mother, Charlotte, who had some scrapes and cuts, said Domenico Cipolla, director of the pediatric emergency room at the hospital.

Sophie’s father was in the hospital’s ****** emergency room and had been in contact with his wife and daughter by phone, Dr. Cipolla said. He was not permitted to release the family’s surname. Both mother and child were in good condition apart from “great emotional stress” he added in a telephone interview.

“We’re comforting them more than curing them,” he said.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Tech #Entrepreneur #Mike #****** #Among #Missing #Yacht #Sinks #Sicily

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up