It was supposed to be a summer celebration.
British tech tycoon Mike Lynch had gathered his tried and trusted lawyers who had been with him every step of the way helping him emerge unscathed from a gruelling 13-year legal battle. Twelve guests had flown into the picturesque Italian port of Porticello, near Palermo from the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland, to mark the end of the fraud trial that had consumed much of their lives.
But now a manslaughter investigation has been launched as Mr Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were among the seven people who died after the vessel capsized during bad weather in the early hours of Monday morning.
Morgan Stanley chairman Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judith Bloomer, Clifford Chance lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda Morvillo also died.
Italian public prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio, from nearby town Termini Imerese said his office has opened an initial investigation into manslaughter and negligent shipwreck.
The group had been welcomed on board the six luxurious suites of Bayesian, a 56-metre-long £30 million superyacht, by the ten crew. Boasting the tallest aluminium mast in the world – higher than Nelson’s Column – experts now speculate it may have caused her to topple and become pinned underwater in an unpredictable, ferocious storm.
The ship was named after the statistical method, the Bayesian inference, an 18th-century theory that helps forecasters predict outcomes more reliably. Mr Lynch based his entire PHD thesis around it, later amassing his huge fortune after selling his company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011.
He had improbably beaten the odds in a bitter US legal dispute with the technology giant, convincing a jury that he was not guilty of claims of massive fraud after a long legal fight that finally came to an end in June. Two months ago he emerged from court with tears in his eyes a free man he pledged to restructure extradition laws that brought him to the US in cuffs.
Disaster struck at around 5am when a freak tornado over the sea known as a waterspout rocked the superyacht, according to Sicily’s civil protection agency. The crew fired off disaster flares causing local fishermen and others to navigate the storm to come to the aid of survivors.
The captain of a nearby boat said that when the winds surged, he had turned on the engine to keep control of his vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian, which had been anchored alongside him.
“We managed to keep the ship in position and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone,” Karsten Borner said.
The other boat “went flat on the water, and then down,” he added. He said his crew then found some of the survivors on a life raft and took them on board before the coast guard picked them up.
This included a one-year-old girl named Sophie one of the 16 survivors, so far.
Her mother, Charlotte Golunski, 36, told how she battled to keep her child above the dark and raging Mediterranean while calling for help amid the awful piercing screams of other struggling guests and crew.
“For two seconds I lost the baby in the sea, then I immediately held her again in the fury of the waves,” she told Giornale di Sicilia. “I held her tightly, tightly to me, while the sea was raging. So many were screaming. Fortunately, the lifeboat inflated and 11 of us managed to get on it.”
This left six passengers unaccounted for – Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Morgan Stanley International non-executive chairman Jonathan Bloomer, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo, and their wives Judy and Neda.
The worn-out Captain of the yacht, James Catfield said simply: “We didn’t see it coming.”
“The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude,” a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo said the next day.
Local fisherman Giuseppe Cefalu told how he saw a “tornado” close to the port on Monday morning. Mr Cefalu said he and his brother Fabio saw a flare in the sky at around 5am.
The pair aided efforts to locate people in the water after the yacht vanished beneath the waves, but Mr Cefalu said he only saw cushions and a buoy.
He said weather conditions on the morning of the sinking were “fierce”, with “very strong” wind and rain.
The luxury superyacht is “practically intact” on the seabed despite sinking, Marco Tilotta, a firefighter diver from Palermo, has told Italian newspaper Il Messaggero.
He said in an interview that the multi-million yacht was lying on its side at a depth of 48 metres, but that divers were unable to gain access because of floating furnishings and other debris inside the yacht.
“The fear is that the bodies got trapped inside the vessel,” which was lying 49 metres deep, Salvatore Cocina, head of civil protection in Sicily, added.
“The biggest difficulty we have is due to the depth, which does not allow long times of intervention,” fire department diver Marco Tilotta told reporters. “We plan … to search centimetre by centimetre.”
Now they enter a critical 24 hours according to Nick Sloane, a lead diver in the Costa Concordia wreck. He told Sky News that survivors might be trapped in air pockets inside the ship, but that time is running out fast to rescue them.
“They’ve got a very small window of time to try to find people stuck inside with hopefully an air pocket, and they could be rescued.
“If the yacht is on its side, it might have more air pockets than if it’s upright. She’s got quite a large keel, and that will deflect and put her on her side, I’m sure.”
