Bloomer among victims found dead on sunken Mike Lynch yacht

Italian search and rescue teams have retrieved a fifth body from a sunken yacht off Sicily, where British tech tycoon Mike Lynch is among those feared to have died.

Morgan Stanley International chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy were among the victims who died, their children said in a statement on Thursday.

A total of six people likely were trapped and died inside the Bayesian when it was hit by a tornado near Porticello, Sicily, on Monday, according to authorities. Adding to the complexity of the search mission is the “narrowness of the spaces” inside the sunken yacht and “the presence of many objects,” the coast guard said.

Overall, of the 22 passengers in the boat, 15 were rescued on Monday. The body of Recaldo Thomas, the ship’s chef, was found soon after the Bayesian sank.

Italian authorities are investigating exactly how the Bayesian sank — and why it sank so quickly — in a storm that struck in the early hours of Monday morning. The captain and other survivors have been questioned by the local prosecutor’s office, according to Italian media.

The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch said it’s also probing the incident, with questions surfacing around the expansiveness of the yacht’s mast and the state of the hull.

“Right now there is no evidence that the mast has been snapped,” coast guard spokesman Vincenzo Zagarola told Bloomberg News. “We can also say that, so far, there is no evidence that the hull has been broken. But we don’t have a clear idea yet of the full damage.”

The head of the company that built the Bayesian said the luxury yacht should have been “unsinkable” given sailboats are built in a way that allows for significant listing without capsizing.

“That ship is unsinkable because it is a sailboat,” Italian Sea Group Chief Executive Officer Giovanni Costantino said in an interview with Bloomberg News. His company bought Perini Navi, the Italian shipbuilder that made the Bayesian, in 2022.

Crews aided by military ships, remote controlled underwater vehicles and helicopters have been searching for missing passengers since Monday. Six guests, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares, and nine crew have been rescued.

Lynch and his daughter Hannah, Bloomer and his wife Judy, and Clifford Chance partner Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda were identified as the missing passengers on Tuesday by authorities in Sicily.

Lynch, 59, and his family were celebrating his recent acquittal from fraud charges with a small group of advisers when the violent storm struck. The charges stemmed from Lynch’s sale of his software firm Autonomy Corp. to Hewlett Packard Co. in 2011. The Silicon Valley giant went on to accuse Lynch of accounting failures. He’d spent years working to clear his name in court and restore his reputation as one of Europe’s most successful entrepreneurs.

A little over two months before the yacht accident, a San Francisco jury found Lynch not guilty of criminal charges that he duped HP into overpaying for his company. He was still fighting HP in a civil case in London, where a British judge held him responsible for creating the illusion of a company much larger and more successful than it really was.

Rescue workers have had difficulties gaining access to the yacht 48 meters below the surface, citing the depth and position of the vessel’s hull.

“The search will go on as long as necessary,” Zagarola told Bloomberg. “For sure the whole hull will need to be inspected meter by meter.”