Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Blumer was among those missing when the boat carrying British tech tycoon Mike Lynch capsized off the coast of Sicily during a severe storm, an Italian official said.
Salvatore Cocina, head of the civil protection organization in Sicily, Blumer and Clifford Chance’s lawyer Chris Morvillo were among the six missing. Lynch and her 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were also missing as of late Monday.
The update came as Lynch’s co-defendant in a US investigation into the sale of his software company to Hewlett-Packard was reported to have died in a car crash in England.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-meter sailing yacht with 22 people on board, was anchored off the coast near the port of Porticello when the storm struck early Monday, the Italian coastguard said in an earlier statement.
A man, understood to be the ship’s cook, was confirmed dead. The coastguard said the missing were British, American and Canadian nationals.
Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bagares, the boat’s owner and a one-year-old girl who was rescued by her mother.
A spokeswoman for Lynch, the co-founder of Automation, a software company that has become one of the shining lights of the UK tech scene, declined to comment. Survivors said Lynch arranged the trip for his work colleagues.
Lynch, once described as Britain’s Bill Gates, has spent much of the past decade defending his name in court against fraud allegations linked to the $11bn sale of his software company Autonomy to US technology giant Hewlett-Packard.
The 59-year-old was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June after spending more than a year under house arrest.
Hours after news of the drowning broke, the inquest revealed that her co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain, had died after being hit by a car while jogging in Cambridgeshire.
Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former vice president of finance, was attacked on Saturday morning and put on life support, Reuters reported. In a statement, Chamberlain’s attorney, Gary Linzenberg, said he died after being “brutally hit” by a car while fleeing.
On Monday, rescue divers were trying to reach the Bayesian’s hull with 10 people and 12 passengers aboard, the Italian coast guard said.
The boat sank at a depth of about 49 meters and the public prosecutor’s office in Termini Imeris is investigating the incident.
“The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not to this extent,” a coastguard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters.
The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters that when the wind picked up, he controlled his vessel and turned on the engine to avoid colliding with the Bayesian, which was anchored alongside him.
“We were able to position the ship and when the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone,” Carsten Börner told reporters. The other boat “flattened in the water and then went under,” he added.
He said his crew found some of the survivors — including a baby girl and her mother — and got them aboard before the Coast Guard picked them up.
Eight of the rescued people, including a one-year-old child, were shifted to hospitals and all are in stable condition.
Domenico Cipolla, head doctor at Di Cristina Hospital in Palermo, where the one-year-old girl and her mother were admitted, said: “The baby is fine. Mom is also in good condition with minor bruises. The father will also be discharged from the hospital soon.
“They said most of them were colleagues who worked for Lynch. They are deeply saddened. As time goes on, they feel more and more this morning that they have lost many friends.
New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed two New Zealanders were on the boat.
New Zealand lawyer Ayla Ronald was named as one of the survivors. Her father, Lynn Ronald, confirmed to the Guardian that his daughter was safe, but left shaken after the event.
Ronald works at international law firm Clifford Chance and was working in London on Lynch’s long-running fraud case, his father said.
Storms and heavy rain have lashed Italy in recent days after weeks of intense heat that has pushed Mediterranean temperatures to record levels, raising the risk of extreme weather conditions, experts said.
“The sea surface temperature around Sicily is around 30C (86F), which is almost 3 degrees above normal. This creates an enormous energy source that contributes to these storms,” said meteorologist Luca Mercalli.
“We can’t say it’s all due to global warming, but we can say it has a multiplier effect,” he told Reuters.
