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BUY a Nicholson 32

Nicholson 32 yachts for sale.

On this page you can find details of Association members’ Nicholson 32 yachts currently for sale.

If you are selling your Nic 32 and would like to show details please complete and submit the form on the Sell Your Yacht page in the Members’ area. This service is only available to members of the Nicholson 32 Association.  When you have sold your boat, please let the webmaster or honsec know!

Nicholson 32 Mk VI (1968)

Contact: by email below or phone

Tel: +31 653170974

Email:  click here

Nicholson 32 Mk III (1963)

Morning sky.

Contact: Wilf Harrison Pettit

Tel: 07592 285120

Nicholson 32 Mk X (1972)

Contact: Moss Fereneze

Tel: 07866 080991

Nicholson 32 (1977)

Brought back to the Royal Engineers Moorings at Upnor and  finally to the Medway Yacht Club by the present owner. Name changed to PHARAOH.

Well equipped, she has new bateries and comes with her own cradle, a tender and outboard motor.  Detailed itinerary on enquiry.

Selling price: £12,000

Contact: Bill Chappell

Tel: +44 1474 706914 (or +44 7919 915688)

£16,000

Solid UK built cruising yacht

View all Photos

Lying: Argyll, Oban, United Kingdom

General Information

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Manufacturer/Model	Sadler 32
Name	STORMALONG
Designer	David Sadler
Year	1979
Category	Sail
New or Used	Used
Sale Status	Available
Price	£16,000
Lying	Argyll, Oban, United Kingdom
Reference	2677150

Specifications

LOA	9.6m
LWL	7.32m
Beam	3.2m
Draft	1.7m
Displacement	4309kg
Hull Construction	GRP
Keel Type	Fin Keel

Engine	Beta Marine marine diesel engine (1996) 28hp 3 cylinder, naturally aspirated, directly cooled marine diesel Mechanical reversing marine gearbox Single lever morse control
Engine Hours	3650
Fuel	diesel
Fuel Capacity	70l

Accommodation

Drinking Water Capacity

300l

Description

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Available to view by appointment.

Please note all our listed yachts are privately owned and located in the owner's home port or marina. Due to the varying geographical marina locations of our yachts and the subsequent travel time and distances involved, please only make travel arrangements to view if actively considering purchase.

Office Hours Mon- Fri 08.30 – 18.00 Saturday & Sunday by prior appointment

For more information or to arrange an appointment please contact Mark Cameron Yachts

Tel: +44 (0)7988 763254 Email: [email protected]

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2005 SOUTHERLY 110 FOR SALE  -  £115,000 Lying Kinsale, Ireland

TELEPHONE: 01243 512611

(click on image above to stop scroll and enlarge images)

SOUTHERLY 32

LOA: 9.97m (32'9") LWL: 8.80m (29'10") Beam: 3.60m (11'10")

Draft Min: 0.83m (2'9")

Draft Max: 2.26m (7'4")

Disp'ment: 7,456kg (16,438 lbs)

Ballast: 1,927kg (4,248 lbs), keel weight: 846kg (1,865lbs), total ballast:2,773kg (6,113lbs) .

Air draft: 16.60 m (54'6'')

Make: Yanmar 3YM3 29 hp

Fuel: 137 litres (30 gallons) Water: 165 litres (36 gallons)

Sail areas:

Mainsail: 32.83 sq m (353 s ft)

Self tacking jib: 19.79 sq m (213 sq ft)

Furling  Genoa: 32.7 sq m (352 sq ft)

Gennaker: 48.3 sq m (520 sq ft)

The perfect yacht for family cruising ....

great performance, self tacking jib for easy sailing, comfortable cockpit

and spacious interior

Deep draft  performance with  shallow draft  freedom

Stephen Jones was commissioned to embody the established features of the Southerly within a hull to fit a 10m mooring whilst providing good live aboard facilities and excellent sailing performance.

The result sets very high standards which will appeal to many; comfortable cockpit with good storage, wide side decks for safe footing, easy to handle rig with self tacking jib, light and airy interior with accommodation to sleep up to six people.

Under sail, the Southerly 32 is fast and exhilarating -and a real pleasure to helm. The modern hull shape with plumb stem and long waterline length provides impressive sailing performance whilst the broad transom, twin rudders and Whitlock direct rod steering gives instantly responsive helming and exceptional directional stability - making the yacht easy to control.

Single line mainsail reefing and a Furlex on the self tacking jib makes sail handling easy – ideal for family or short handed sailing. The furling self tacking jib means you can tack spontaneously, allowing you to sail in conditions that a conventional sail plan may not allow, such as in a harbour or congested sailing area.

Deep draft performance with  shallow draft freedom

The unique Swing Keel provides deep draft performance 6’11’’ (deeper than most yachts), whilst at the ‘touch of a button’ the keel can be raised to just 2’4’‘ for shallow draft freedom, allowing you to sail in coastal areas and inland waters.

The instant feeling of space inside the Southerly 32, is quite incredible. The raised coachroof extends forward to the mast area, providing good head height throughout whilst generous open plan seating provides a very sociable and spacious saloon. The keel trunk is discreetly hidden within the central table which has fold down leaves to both sides. The seating can convert to single berths for additional sleeping, if required.

The galley is well planned with good views and light, Corian type work surfaces, stainless steel grab rail, twin stainless steel sinks, a refrigerated ice box and a fully gimballed cooker with two burners, grill and oven are standard.   The chart table is in the raised position to take advantage of the panoramic views.

The spacious aft cabin has a large double berth and plenty of storage including a vanity unit. A second door provides ensuite facilities to the spacious heads. The forward cabin is a generous size with twin v berths, good head height, and ample storage.

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Who was onboard tech mogul Mike Lynch's Bayesian yacht?

Topic: Disasters, Accidents and Emergency Incidents

Six people are missing, including a man dubbed the British Bill Gates, after a luxury yacht sank off the Sicilian coast.

British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch — freshly acquitted from a decade-long trial — had invited his work colleagues aboard a trip through the Mediterranean coast when a freak storm saw the yacht sink within moments.

Fifteen people escaped from the sinking vessel. The search for the missing continues.

Here's what we know so far: 

What happened?

The Italian coastguard said the yacht — the Bayesian — was anchored off the shore of port city Porticello, near the Sicilian capital Palermo, when it was hit by bad weather sometime after 4am on Monday, local time. 

Eyewitnesses said it vanished quickly beneath the waves shortly before dawn.

Managers of the sailing vessel Bayesian, Camper & Nicholsons, confirmed to the ABC that the Bayesian encountered severe weather and subsequently sank. 

"Our priority is assisting with the ongoing search and providing all necessary support to the rescued passengers and crew," they said. 

"The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude," a coastguard official told Reuters.

Sicily's civil protection agency head, Salvo Cocina, said a waterspout — a tornado over the water — could have struck the yacht.

"They were in the wrong place at the wrong time," Mr Cocina added. 

Storms and heavy rainfall had swept down Italy in recent days after weeks of scorching heat, lifting the temperature of the Mediterranean Sea to record levels and raising the risk of extreme weather conditions, experts told Reuters.

"The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees Celsius, which is almost 3 degrees more than normal. This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms," meteorologist Luca Mercalli said.

Rescuers recover the body of one of the people aboard the Bayesian.  ( AP: Lucio Ganci )

Captain Karsten Borner of the Sir Robert Baden Powell vessel told journalists he noticed the Bayesian nearby during the storm, but after it calmed he saw a red flare and realised the ship had simply disappeared.

Mr Borner said he and a crew member boarded their tender and found a lifeboat with 15 people, some of them injured, who they then took aboard and alerted the coast guard.

Search crews, including helicopters and divers, are continuing to search the wreckage, lying at a depth of 49 metres.

Specialist divers reached the ship on Monday but access was limited due to objects in the way, the fire brigade said.

The UK Marine Accident Investigation Branch is deploying a team of four inspectors to Italy to conduct a preliminary assessment.

The Foreign Commonwealth and Development office said it was "providing consular support to a number of British nationals and their families".

Sicilian prosecutors have also opened an investigation into the event. 

Who is missing?

Lawyer Chris Morvillo (left), entrepreneur Mike Lynch, and Morgan Stanley chairman Jonathan Bloomer are among the missing. 

There were 12 passengers and 10 crew members aboard the yacht. 

Mr Cocina said the crew and passengers hailed from a variety of countries, including Britain, the United States, Antigua, France, Germany, Ireland, Myanmar, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Spain.

Of the 22, one man is confirmed dead and another six people are still missing. 

They are believed to be inside the hull, fire rescue spokesperson Luca Cari said.

Fabio Cefalù, a fisherman who said he responded to a flare from the vessel but found it sunk, said he stayed at the site for three hours without finding anyone.

"I think they are inside, all the missing people," he said.

Rescue teams recovered the body of the yacht's onboard chef on Monday, identified as Antiguan citizen Ricardo Thomas.

The still missing people include: 

• Mr Lynch's 18-year-old daughter, Hannah 
• Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of global financial services company Morgan Stanley International
• Chris Morvillo , a lawyer at the British multinational law firm Clifford Chance. He worked on Mr Lynch's lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard
• The identities of the remaining two missing are still unconfirmed

Who was rescued? 

Fifteen people escaped from the sinking ship. 

Eight have been hospitalised and others were taken to a nearby hotel.

Charlotte Golunski was among those rescued, recalling the harrowing moments she held her child Sofia above the waves.  ( Supplied: Facebook  )

Among those rescued were:

• Mr Lynch's wife, Angela Bacares, who was the owner of the yacht
• Charlotte Golunski and her one-year-old daughter, Sofia. Ms Golunski is a partner at Mr Lynch's firm, Invoke Capital. She says she momentarily lost hold of Sofia in the water but managed to hold her up above the waves until the lifeboat was inflated
• Ms Golunski's husband James Emslie
• New Zealand captain of the yacht James Catfield. He told Italian newspaper La Repubblica the crew didn't see the storm coming
• A lone Dutch citizen was identified by the Dutch foreign ministry as being rescued, but was not identified

Who is Mike Lynch?

Mr Lynch, once hailed as Britain’s king of technology, was recently freed from a Silicon Valley lawsuit that tarnished his legacy. 

The 59-year-old Cambridge-educated mathematician created Autonomy , a search engine that could pore through emails and other internal business documents to help companies find vital information more quickly. 

He received the OBE for his innovation in 2006. 

He then sold the software to Hewlett-Packard (HP) for $US11 billion ($16 billion) in 2011, with Mr Lynch personally netting $US800 million. 

HP valued Autonomy at $US46 billion ($68 billion) in the months leading up to the deal.

Mike Lynch in 2019 leaving the High Court in London.  ( Reuters: Henry Nicholls/File Photo )

But the deal quickly turned sour after he was accused of forging the software's financial records to make the sale.

As part of a decades-long legal battle against HP, Mr Lynch was extradited to the UK on criminal fraud charges. 

He steadfastly denied any wrongdoing, asserting that he was being made a scapegoat for HP's own bungling. 

He was eventually cleared of all charges in June this year. 

Although he avoided a possible prison sentence, Lynch still faced a bill from a civil case in London that HP mostly won during 2022. Damages haven't been determined in that case, but HP is seeking $US4 billion. 

Following the San Francisco trial, Mr Lynch said he would return to the UK and do what he loved most: "[being with] my family and innovating in my field."

The holiday appeared to be something of a celebration after Mr Lynch's acquittal, with guests including some of the people who had stood by Lynch throughout the ordeal.

This picture shows the rescue operations off the Sicilian coast.  ( AP: Italian Coast Guard  )

In a separate act of tragedy, Mr Lynch's co-defendant in the trial, Stephen Chamberlain, died on Monday, after a road accident left him critically injured.

Mr Chamberlain — Autonomy's former vice-president of finance alongside Mr Lynch — was hit by a car in Cambridgeshire on Saturday morning and had been placed on life support. 

What is the Bayesian?

The luxury yacht is 56m long sailboat, with a 75m mast labelled as the tallest aluminium mast in the world.

It was previously named Salute when it flew under a Dutch flag.

The yacht, built in 2008 by the Italian firm Perini Navi, can accommodate up to 12 guests in six suites and a crew of 10, according to online specialist yacht sites. It was last refitted in 2020.

Online charter sites listed it for rent for up to 195,000 euros (about $AU 321,000) a week. 

This picture taken on Sunday shows the Bayesian (left) and the Duch sailboat Sir Robert Baden Powell anchored off the coast line.   ( AP: Fabio La Bianca/Baia Santa Nicolicchia )

The ship also won a string of awards for its design. 

Ms Golunski said the yacht had travelled through the Aeolian Islands, Milazzo and Cefalù before sinking. 

It is likely the yacht's name would resonate with Mr Lynch because his PhD thesis and the software that made his fortune was based on Bayesian theory.

Watch CBS News

Luxury yacht sinks off Sicily, leaving U.K. tech magnate Mike Lynch, 2 Americans among those missing

By Anna Matranga

Updated on: August 20, 2024 / 7:47 PM EDT / CBS News

Rome  — Six people, including two U.S. nationals, a British technology entrepreneur and one of his daughters, were still missing Tuesday after a large luxury sailing yacht sank off the coast of the southern Italian island of Sicily during a violent storm. The 184-foot Bayesian had been anchored about half a mile off the port of Porticello, near Palermo, with 22 people on board — 10 crew members and 12 passengers.

The vessel sank at about 5 a.m. local time (11 p.m. Eastern, Sunday) after being hit by a possible waterspout spawned by the storm. Italian media said the winds snapped the boat's single mast, unbalancing the vessel and causing it to capsize.

Fifteen of those on board managed to escape the yacht and were rescued by a Dutch-flagged vessel that was anchored in the immediate vicinity. They were brought ashore by Italian Coast Guard and firefighters.

One body — an unidentified male — was recovered, but six people remained missing, including British software magnate Mike Lynch, once described as Britain's Bill Gates. 

Lynch was acquitted in June of fraud charges in the U.S. that could have landed him with a decades-long prison sentence. In an unusual twist, Lynch's co-defendant in that fraud case, who was also acquitted, died Saturday after being hit by a car while out jogging in England.

Lynch's teenage daughter Hannah was also among those missing, along with Lynch's American lawyer Chris Morvillo, a former assistant district attorney in New York, and his wife Neda. British banker Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, was also still missing Tuesday.

Among the survivors was a 1-year-old British girl who was being treated at a nearby hospital along with her parents. They were doing well, according to Italian media.

"For two seconds I lost my child to the sea, then I immediately was able to grab her again in the fury of the waves," the girl's mother, identified only as Charlotte, was quoted as saying by Italy's ANSA news agency. "I held on to her tightly in the stormy sea. Many were screaming. Luckily the life raft opened up and 11 of us managed to get aboard."

"It was terrible," she told ANSA. "In just a few minutes the boat was hit by a very strong wind, and sunk soon thereafter."

Karsten Borner, the captain of the Dutch vessel that came to the rescue, told ANSA he had been anchored near the Bayesian.

"When the storm was over we noticed that the ship behind us was gone, and then we saw a red flare, so my first mate and I went to the position and we found this life raft drifting, and in the life raft was also a little baby and the wife of the owner."

Recovery efforts were back underway Tuesday, with speedboats, helicopters and divers continuing to search for the missing — as well as for answers, as to how a state-of-the-art superyacht could disappear in a flash. 

According to Italian media, Fire Brigade divers reached the boat and saw bodies trapped inside some of the cabins, but they had been unable to recover any of the victims from inside the vessel by Tuesday, due to obstructions. The Bayesian appeared to have sunk in an area with a depth of about 160 feet.

Witnesses said the boat sank quickly. 

"I was at home when the tornado hit," fisherman Pietro Asciutto told a local news outlet. "I immediately closed all the windows. Then I saw the boat, it had only one mast, it was very large. I suddenly saw it sink... The boat was still floating, then suddenly it disappeared. I saw it sink with my own eyes."

The director-general of Sicily's civil protection agency, Salvatore Cocina, confirmed to CBS News partner BBC News  that three of the six people still missing Monday were British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, whose company Autonomy Corporation PLC was acquired in 2011 by HP ; one of his daughters, Hannah Lynch, who is believed to be 18; and the boat's chef, Ricardo Thomas.

CBS News has seen corporate documentation showing a company called Revtom, solely owned by Lynch's wife Angela Bacares, who was among those rescued from the accident, as the owner of the yacht that capsized off Sicily. 

While the yacht was a privately owned pleasure boat, the waters around the island have claimed many lives over the last decade.

Dozens of migrants have died attempting to reach Sicily and smaller Italian islands in the region. Sicily sits only about 100 miles from the east coast of Tunisia in north Africa, and the Mediterranean crossing has been a frequent site of both nautical rescues and disasters as smugglers routinely send small boats overloaded with desperate people into the sea.

Alex Sundby , Joanne Stocker and Chris Livesay contributed to this report.

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Mike Lynch won a dramatic 12-year legal battle over his tech company. Weeks later, he and his top lawyer are dead.

• Mike Lynch won an unexpected jury acquittal after a dramatic 12-year legal saga.
• HP accused him of cooking the books of his company Autonomy to make it seem worth billions more.
• He finally won — and then he, his lawyer, and his codefendant all died within days.

In 2011, Mike Lynch was the toast of the tech world.

Hailed as Britain's Bill Gates, Lynch sold Autonomy, his groundbreaking data-management company, to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion.

Shareholders and business commentators were puzzled about what HP, a hardware company, would do with Autonomy, a software company — and why the latter was worth $11 billion. HP's executives said at the time that Autonomy had the potential to transform HP and usher the Silicon Valley titan into a new generation.

None of that happened. A year after the acquisition, HP wrote down $8.8 billion of the purchase value and accused Lynch of lying about Autonomy's finances.

The claim led to a vicious decadelong series of legal disputes.

Another Autonomy executive, Sushovan Hussain, was convicted of fraud in 2018 and sentenced to five years in prison. Federal prosecutors brought criminal charges against Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, the company's former vice president of finance.

Lynch's court battles concluded with a three-month criminal trial in San Francisco. After just two days of deliberation, jurors found Lynch and Chamberlain not guilty on all counts.

"The truth has finally prevailed," his lawyer Chris Morvillo said.

Within months, Lynch, Chamberlain, and Morvillo were all dead.

A takeover doomed from the start

Lynch, who studied neural networks for his Ph.D. at Cambridge University, spun off Autonomy from a previous company, Cambridge Neurodynamics, in 1996.

Using sophisticated algorithms, Autonomy allowed users to organize and search through large amounts of unstructured data. It was a bright spot in Britain's tech industry and was listed on the country's stock-market index.

Autonomy's clients included Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, AT&T, and HP itself. But HP's purchase of Autonomy was controversial.

The hardware company's CEO, Léo Apotheker , who had been in the position for less than a year, tried to shift the company's direction. HP had struggled to sell printers and servers as part of its traditional hardware business. Apotheker wanted to spin off HP's personal-computing division and make a big bet on moving the company into software, which had higher margins.

Analysts hated the idea. Shareholders sued. HP's value dropped by more than half. The company's board fired Apotheker within weeks of the decision to buy Autonomy, before the deal even closed.

Related stories

His successor, Meg Whitman, fired Lynch and wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion, which indicated HP paid nearly four times what it should have. The New York Times columnist James B. Stewart floated the case that it was the worst acquisition in corporate history — even worse than AOL's ill-fated purchase of Time Warner.

In a stunning move, HP accused Lynch of fraud the following year. The company alleged he and Hussain, a former CFO, inflated Autonomy's sales figures. The FBI and the UK's Serious Fraud Office both opened investigations.

Lynch fervently denied accusations of wrongdoing. He pointed out that Autonomy was audited by Deloitte, which hadn't found issues. Lynch said HP stifled Autonomy with mismanagement and bureaucracy that pushed out employees and stymied sales.

The culture at HP, he said, was poisonous.

"It was like boarding a plane, realizing the engine is on fire, and then going up to the cockpit only to find that the pilots are having a fight," he told The Telegraph at the time .

According to The New York Times, lawyers representing shareholders in the lawsuit against HP obtained a copy of the company's own KPMG-prepared due-diligence report. The report said that Autonomy wasn't transparent enough with its finances, but Apotheker moved forward with the takeover anyway, deciding that Autonomy's potential was worth it.

A legal morass

The UK's Serious Fraud Office announced in January 2015 that it closed its investigation into Autonomy, finding insufficient evidence for legal action, though it referred some issues to the US Justice Department.

In the subsequent months, HP and Lynch sued each other in the UK. As those cases wound their way through the British court system, US prosecutors continued investigating HP's purchase of Autonomy. In 2016, they brought fraud charges against Hussain, who was found guilty in a 2018 jury trial. British regulators formally barred him from the financial industry earlier this year after he completed a five-year sentence in the US.

HP unloaded Autonomy altogether, selling parts of it in 2016 and 2017.

In November 2018, Justice Department prosecutors went directly after Lynch and Chamberlain.

Their indictment accused Lynch and Chamberlain of falsifying financial documents, lying to auditors and regulators, and suppressing the voices of people who criticized Autonomy's financial practices.

Lynch was no longer looking at civil fights over money. He was facing the prospect of up to 20 years in prison.

For years, Lynch fought extradition to the US. Powerful in British political circles — he had advised David Cameron when Cameron was prime minister and served on the boards of the BBC and the British Museum — he and his lawyers argued that his legal issues should play out in the UK, not the US. American criminal laws were unfairly stacked against him, his lawyers said.

HP's lawsuit against Lynch — still churning in the background — finally went to trial in 2019. Apotheker testified he would have abandoned the Autonomy acquisition if he had a better understanding of its finances. Lynch argued that the whole morass was orchestrated by Whitman, Apotheker's successor, who harbored political ambitions (she ran for governor in California and is currently the US ambassador to Kenya) and wanted to shift the blame for Autonomy's failures to someone else.

Robert Hildyard, the judge who oversaw the case, ruled mostly in HP's favor. In a 2022 decision that ran over 1,700 pages, he wrote that HP overpaid for Autonomy because of deceit from Lynch and Hussain. Hildyard hadn't yet decided how much they would owe in damages, but he wrote it would be "substantially less" than the $5 billion HP asked for.

When he wasn't fighting legal battles, Lynch continued to be an entrepreneur. He founded a venture-capital firm, Invoke Capital, and invested in and helped run the cybersecurity firm Darktrace, which,  Politico reported, has deep ties  to Britain's intelligence agencies.

Financial disclosures Lynch filed last year as part of his criminal case indicated he was worth about $450 million.

The criminal trial

The UK finally extradited Lynch to the US in May 2023 , where he prepared for his trial — alongside Chamberlain as a codefendant — while under house arrest in San Francisco.

Lynch had a top-shelf legal team, but after the British court loss and Hussain's conviction, the chances of an acquittal seemed bleak.

Lynch testified at the end of his three-month trial, which began in March, telling jurors he wasn't involved in day-to-day financial oversight of the company. Misunderstandings, he said, could be chalked up to the differences between British and American accounting practices.

"A lot of what we've been looking at is like peering through the door of a kitchen and seeing the sausage-making machine, and that's how it really works," he told jurors, according to The Times of London . "If you take the microscope into even the most spotless kitchen, you'd find bacteria. If it wasn't there, that'd be something very abnormal. I don't think Autonomy was any different."

Jurors believed him. In June, they declared Lynch not guilty of the 15 charges against him, clearing Chamberlain as well.

Morvillo, one of Lynch's lawyers in the trial — as well as in the preceding decade of legal disputes — praised the jury, saying it had rejected "the government's profound overreach in this case."

"This verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP's well-documented ineptitude on Dr. Lynch," Morvillo said in a joint statement with his attorney colleague Brian Heberlig. "Thankfully, the truth has finally prevailed."

In an interview with The Times of London after the trial , Lynch reflected on how, with a great burden lifted off him at the age of 59, he could remake his life.

He mourned the deaths of his brother and mother, who both died ahead of the criminal trial. He mused about using his fortune to start a British version of the Innocence Project, which prevents wrongful convictions in the US.

"Now you have a second life," he told The Times. "The question is, what do you want to do with it?"

But first, a celebration. Lynch; his wife, Angela Bacares; one of his two daughters; Morvillo and his wife, Neda; and several others went on a superyacht, the Bayesian , which was anchored outside Sicily and owned by Bacares.

Chamberlain moved back to the UK. While running near his home, a driver hit him with a car . He died in a hospital on Saturday.

On Monday, a sudden storm struck the Bayesian. The yacht capsized.

Of its 22 passengers, 15, including Bacares, were rescued.

But rescuers have pulled five bodies from the wreckage, including Morvillo's and Lynch's . A sixth remains trapped inside the boat. Lynch's daughter Hannah remains missing.

Correction: August 22, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misnamed Lynch's lawyer. His name was Chris Morvillo, not Charles Morvillo.

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Mike Lynch, Tech Mogul Acquitted of Fraud, Dies at 59

The British entrepreneur was found not guilty of fraud charges in the sale of his company to Hewlett-Packard. He was celebrating his acquittal when his yacht sank off the coast of Sicily.

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By Michael J. de la Merced

Michael de la Merced reported on Mike Lynch’s career and legal battles over the course of 13 years across two continents.

Mike Lynch , a British software mogul who was once celebrated as a top technology leader — only to spend more than a decade defending himself against accusations that he orchestrated one of the biggest frauds in Silicon Valley history — died on Monday after his yacht sank off the coast of Sicily . He was 59.

An official in the Italian city of Palermo confirmed on Thursday that Mr. Lynch’s body had been recovered by divers.

Twelve guests and 10 crew members were onboard the yacht, the Bayesian, when it went down during a violent storm. Mr. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was rescued, along with nine crew members and five other passengers. Seven bodies have been recovered, including one thought to be that of Mr. Lynch’s daughter, Hannah Lynch.

Mr. Lynch’s death came two months after he was acquitted in federal court in San Francisco of criminal fraud charges, tied to the $11 billion sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. The takeover, widely regarded among investors as one of the worst deals in history , led HP to accuse Mr. Lynch of deception.

Prosecutors in the United States charged Mr. Lynch with more than a dozen counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the deal, with a potential sentence running to about two decades in prison.

On the day in 2023 that a British judge found him liable for civil fraud in the matter, the British government — despite numerous appeals by Mr. Lynch — approved his extradition to the United States. He was confined to a townhouse in San Francisco under 24-hour surveillance, on his own dime. During his house arrest, his mother, Dolores, and his brother, Richard, died.

The accusations sullied the reputation of Mr. Lynch, who was known at one point as Britain’s Bill Gates.

Michael Richard Lynch was born on June 16, 1965, to Michael and Dolores Lynch, working-class immigrants from Ireland, and grew up outside London. He attended private school on a scholarship and graduated from Cambridge before founding Autonomy in 1996. The company helped clients analyze unstructured information to unearth hidden insights about their businesses.

By 2011, Autonomy had become one of Britain’s most prominent technology companies, with its home base sometimes called “Silicon Fen” — a name derived from its location at the southern tip of the Fenland, a marshy area in eastern England.

Mr. Lynch became a celebrity in British tech circles. He was a member of the Royal Society, one of the country’s top scientific associations; an adviser to David Cameron, the prime minister at the time; and a member of the BBC’s board.

Autonomy drew the attention of HP, which had sought to transform its fortunes by buying a high-powered software company, and which eventually paid 60 percent over the British company’s market value. But investors and analysts opposed the deal, and HP wrote down the value of the transaction by $8.8 billion. HP fired the chief executive who led the deal and, soon after, Mr. Lynch himself.

Meg Whitman, the former eBay leader who took over HP, accused Mr. Lynch and his lieutenants of “serious accounting improprieties” that misled her company over the state of Autonomy’s business.

But Mr. Lynch — armed with the hundreds of millions that he collected from Autonomy’s sale — hired an army of lawyers to argue that HP had been aware of the company’s practices. His team also said that Mr. Lynch had largely delegated the company’s day-to-day financial operations.

Mr. Lynch’s trial began in San Francisco in March. It stretched out over three months and involved reams of often dense internal documents. After two days of deliberations, a jury found Mr. Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, a former Autonomy vice president of finance who faced similar charges, not guilty on all counts. (Mr. Chamberlain was fatally struck by a car on Saturday while out for a run, his lawyer, Gary S. Lincenberg, said Monday in an emailed statement.)

After the verdict, Mr. Lynch said in a statement, “I am looking forward to returning to the U.K. and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.” He later returned to his homes, in London and Suffolk.

While defending himself against the HP accusations, Mr. Lynch became a venture capitalist, founding Invoke Capital to invest in companies including the cybersecurity provider Darktrace.

More recently, he had begun to focus on artificial intelligence research, including ways the technology could help those with hearing difficulties.

His survivors include his wife and another daughter, Esme.

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

Michael J. de la Merced has covered global business and finance news for The Times since 2006. More about Michael J. de la Merced

Mike Lynch, recently acquitted in HP-Autonomy fraud case, is missing after yacht capsized off Sicily (updated)

Update 2 : His body has now been identified. Story here .

Update : Authorities have yet to access the inside of the sunken yacht, and Mike Lynch is still classified as missing. Other details have emerged in the interim.

The accident appears to have been caused by a major storm and a resulting tornado-like water column that ensnared and damaged the yacht. Among the other six people still missing are Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter and Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer. The voyage was to celebrate Lynch being acquitted of criminal charges in the U.S., and several members of his legal team were also on board. (The ship was registered to Lynch’s wife, one of the survivors.) By a terrible coincidence, the other person acquitted in Lynch’s trial — Autonomy’s finance head Stephen Chamberlain — had died just a few days before when he was hit by a car while out jogging. Original article continues below.

Mike Lynch, the investor and high-profile founder of U.K. tech firm Autonomy, has been declared missing at sea after the yacht he was on, the Bayesian , capsized in a storm off the coast of Sicily early Monday morning.

TechCrunch confirmed with a source close to the rescue operation that Lynch is one of six people missing from the boat. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, is one of the 15 who have been rescued. One body has been found.

The news is a dramatic, tragic development for one of the more colorful, and sometimes controversial, figures in technology out of the U.K.

Lynch’s enterprise technology firm Autonomy was acquired in 2011 by HP for $11 billion — a major milestone for U.K. technology. But it quickly turned sour, and HP sued Lynch and other executives at the company, arguing it was misled in the transaction.

HP claimed that the deal led to a $4 billion loss — money it then demanded from Lynch and his former CFO. Lynch (pictured above, left) long asserted that he acted in good faith and that he was being made into a scapegoat over a merger gone bad.

That legal drama went on for more than a decade and involved a host of other thorny chapters, including Lynch’s extradition to the U.S. and a lot of very bad publicity for Lynch. It also led to a second civil case that took place in 2022 in the U.K., which Lynch lost.

The U.S. criminal case, where Lynch was charged with 15 counts of fraud and conspiracy, went to trial earlier this year in San Francisco. Finally, in June, Lynch was acquitted .

“I am elated with today’s verdict and grateful to the jury for their attention to the facts over the last ten weeks. My deepest thanks go to my legal team for their tireless work on my behalf,” Lynch said at the time. “I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.”

In the interim years, Lynch built up a profile in the U.K. as an investor, most prominently as the founder of Invoke Capital . The VC firm was the biggest investor in cybersecurity firm Darktrace, a connection that was not without its own controversy . It also invested in Sophia Genetics , Featurespace and Luminance, among others. And it appeared that this is the route that he was set to continue.

Our thoughts go out to his family, friends and colleagues. We’ll update this post as we learn more.

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