Shipwreck in Sicily: Who is Mike Lynch, ‘Britain’s Bill Gates’, missing with his daughter?

The search continues in Sicily for Mike Lynch and the rest of the missing after the wreck of the yacht he was on.

Mike Lynch, the software millionaire missing after his luxury yacht sank off Sicily, is one of the few examples of a British entrepreneur who built a global technology company, The Guardian reports.

This fact has led to him being called the “British Bill Gates,” but his story is actually very different from that of the Microsoft founder.

The director general of Sicily’s civil protection service, Salvatore Cucina, confirmed to the BBC that Mike Lynch, his daughter Hannah Lynch and the chef Riccardo Thomas were among those missing from the wreckage. Hannah is about 18 years old.

The rescue operation will continue throughout the night, Cucina said, as a team specialising in cave search and rescue has now arrived from Rome, hoping to “achieve results” either during the night or at the latest tomorrow morning.

The 56-metre-long, British-flagged yacht Bayesian sank with 22 people on board shortly before dawn on Monday.

Mike Lynch has been acquitted of 15 fraud charges he faced in the US.

Less than three months ago, the 59-year-old was acquitted of 15 U.S. fraud charges related to the $11.1 billion purchase of his company, Autonomy, by Silicon Valley giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011, a case he feared would end with him dying in prison from a lung disease.

“I have various medical things that would have made it very difficult for me to survive,” Leeds told The Sunday Times last month. “If something had gone wrong, it would have been the end of life as I knew it, literally.”

Born in Ireland to a nurse mother and a firefighter father.

Lynch was born in Ireland, and grew up near Chelmsford, Essex, where his mother was a nurse and his father was a firefighter.

He studied physics, mathematics and biochemistry at Cambridge University, eventually specialising in adaptive pattern recognition. His doctoral thesis is said to be one of the most widely read research works in the university library.

After founding a few technology startups — including one specializing in automated license plate, fingerprint, and facial recognition software for police — he founded Autonomy in 1996.

Its software has been used by companies to analyze massive amounts of stored data, and its effectiveness is owed in part to Bayesian inference, a statistical theory formulated by statistician, philosopher, and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes in the 18th century.

Autonomy was an almost immediate commercial success. The company was listed on the Brussels Stock Exchange in 1998, and rapid growth coupled with the dot-com “boom” led to a move to the London Stock Exchange, where Autonomy joined the FTSE 100 index of leading UK listed companies.

Leeds became a scientific adviser to David Cameron when he was Prime Minister.

Leeds’ triumphs led to him becoming a scientific adviser to David Cameron when he was Prime Minister and a non-executive director of the BBC, as well as being awarded an OBE in 2006 for services to entrepreneurship.

But while Autonomy impressed HP enough to pay more than $11 billion for the company in 2011, it took the US IT giant just a year to write off the $8.8 billion purchase, saying it had discovered “serious accounting irregularities” at the British company.

Since then, Leeds has been actively involved in defending his reputation – with the fallout from the allegations continuing despite the businessman always denying allegations of wrongdoing.

Autonomy’s former CFO, Suchavan Hussain, has been sentenced to five years in prison in the United States after being convicted in 2018 of fraud in connection with the HP deal.

In 2022, Leeds lost a civil fraud case brought by HP in the UK, in which it was argued that the businessman exercised control over Hussain and that it was inconceivable that the Autonomy founder was unaware of the fraudulent practices allegedly taking place at his company.

Hildyard, the Supreme Court judge in the case, was scheduled to rule on HP’s $4 billion claim for damages, and had said he intended to award much less. Lynch said he planned to appeal the decision.

Leeds is said to have put his personal stamp on the companies he ran, making clear his preference for James Bond. Meeting rooms were reportedly named after Bond enemies, such as Dr. No and Goldfinger, while Autonomy had a piranha tank in the lobby, a nod to the 007 adventure You Only Live Twice.

He spent his free time building model railways and raising koi carp.

This professional image of Leeds seems at odds with what is known about him personally: he is married with two daughters, and is said to spend his spare time building model railways and raising carp.

Since his acquittal in the US, he has said he intends to address what he sees as a flaw in the UK-US extradition treaty. “It must be wrong for the US Attorney General to have more power over a British citizen living in England than the British police,” he said.

He and his wife Angela Bakaris, who was said to have been bailed out by Peiser, are said to have a combined fortune of £500m in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List.

One of Lynch’s 18-year-old daughters is also believed to be among the four Britons missing after the boat sank. Americans and Canadians are also missing.