IT WAS A SUNNY AUGUST MORNING when software entrepreneur Mike Lynch, 59, gathered nine of his closest friends, along with his wife and daughter, on the dock of Porto di Milazzo, on the northern coast of Sicily. They had come to celebrate his freedom. Only months before, several of the guests played crucial roles in persuading a San Francisco jury to acquit Lynch of federal charges related to the $11 billion sale of his software firm, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard (HP).
Five days after the yacht left port, Lynch, his daughter, four guests, and a hired chef were dead in the Mediterranean Sea after a storm flooded the ship. The drowned included the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, a star witness at Lynch's trial, as well as one of Lynch's lead defense attorneys. Among the survivors were a former Autonomy exec who went on to become a partner at Lynch's venture capital firm, a second member of his defense team, and Lynch's wife.
As news broke of the drowning, U.K. media reported that Lynch's codefendant in the fraud trial, Stephen Chamberlain, also acquitted, had been fatally struck by a car as he was out jogging near his home outside Cambridge, England-a shocking coincidence.
Several weeks after the tragedy, there remain far more questions than answers. Did the yacht named Bayesian an homage to a statistical theorem for predicting future outcomes - simply fall victim to a terrible storm? How did most of the crew and a few passengers escape, and why couldn't they reach Lynch and the others who did not make it out? (Italian officials are investigating three crew members for manslaughter; no charges had been filed as of late September.)
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