Sicily yacht sinking: Final body found in search for Mike Lynch’s daughter

PORTICELLO, Italy: Divers searching for the last person missing after a superyacht sank off Sicily recovered the body of the teenage daughter of UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch on Friday (Aug 23), the seventh and final victim of a tragedy in which the businessman also perished.
Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah had been among six passengers reported missing after the “Bayesian” went down off the north coast of the Italian island in a storm early on Monday morning.
After Hannah’s body was brought ashore on Friday, her family issued a statement describing their “unspeakable grief”.
“The Lynch family is devastated, in shock and is being comforted and supported by family and friends,” it said.
Search teams had recovered the bodies of four of Lynch’s friends on Wednesday, and that of the entrepreneur himself on Thursday.
The body of a man believed to be the yacht’s chef had been found a few hours after the sailing ship sank.
Lynch, 59, had invited friends and family onto the sailing boat to celebrate his recent acquittal in a massive US fraud case.
But the 56m British-flagged yacht was struck by a waterspout – akin to a mini-tornado – before dawn on Monday as it was anchored off Porticello, near Palermo.
It sank within minutes and now lies on the sea bed 50m down.
Hannah had just finished her end-of-school exams and had a place to study English literature at Oxford University.
Friends described her as warm, loving and “charming and ferociously intelligent”, according to one of the tributes issued by the family.
Lynch, once dubbed the British “Bill Gates”, was “the most brilliant mind and (most) caring person I have ever known”, said another.
The businessman had been acquitted on all charges in a San Francisco court in June after he was accused of a US$11 billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
US lawyer Chris Morvillo, a partner at top law firm Clifford Chance who worked on the trial, also died in the sinking, along with his wife Neda.
Morvillo’s firm Clifford Chance paid tribute to the couple, saying all were “heartbroken at the tragic passing … and still coming to terms with this terrible loss”.
The bodies of Jonathan Bloomer, the chair of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy, were also found.
The Bloomer family said they were suffering “unimaginable grief” for a couple who had been together for five decades.
“Our only comfort is that they are still together now,” the family said.
Many questions remain about why the yacht sank, and so quickly, when other boats nearby were unaffected.
Italian prosecutors have opened a probe and will hold a press conference on Saturday.
On Thursday the head of the company which built the boat said the tragedy could have been avoided.
“Everything that was done reveals a very long summation of errors,” said Giovanni Costantino, head of the Italian Sea Group, which includes the Perini Navi company that built Bayesian in 2008.
He told Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper that bad weather was forecast and all the passengers should have been gathered at a pre-arranged assembly point, with all the doors and hatches closed.
“Instead it took on water with the guests still in the cabin. They ended up in a trap, those poor people ended up like mice in a trap,” he said.
The Bayesian, owned by Lynch’s family, boasted a 75m mast, the tallest aluminium sailing mast in the world, according to the Charter World website.
Raising the wreck would likely cost some 15 million euros and take “six to eight weeks”, according to the salvage engineer who led the operation to recover the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which sank off Italy in 2012.
To recover the yacht, the mast could be removed on the seabed but the boat would be lifted up whole using a giant crane and a team of 40 specialist divers, South African engineer Nick Sloane told the Repubblica daily.