LONDON (Reuters) – The investigation into the deaths of British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, banker Jonathan Bloomer and members of their families who perished when a luxury yacht sank last year will take many months, a British inquest was told on Tuesday.
Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah and Morgan Stanley International chairman Bloomer and his wife Judith died when the superyacht “Bayesian” sank during a severe and sudden storm off the port of Porticello, near Palermo in Sicily on August 19, 2024. Two other guests and the ship’s cook also perished.
The ship, owned by the Lynch family, is still on the seabed, but British investigators said they expected it to be raised and brought to shore next month.
Lynch built Britain’s biggest software company, Autonomy, and sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011.
A year later, HP discovered a massive accounting scandal at Autonomy, and both it and U.S. prosecutors pursued Lynch.
The 59-year-old was celebrating his acquittal on 15 counts of fraud in June 2024 when the sinking occurred.
Italian prosecutors have placed three crew members under investigation: captain James Cutfield, ship engineer Tim Parker Eaton and night watch duty sailor Matthew Griffiths.
They are suspected of manslaughter and causing a shipwreck, although being investigated in Italy does not imply guilt and does not mean formal charges will follow.
The sinking is also being investigated by Britain’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), which examines whether there is criminal culpability, and the Marine Accident Investigation Branch, an inquest hearing at Suffolk Coroner’s Court was told on Tuesday.
“Salvage efforts are beginning to start and we expect it to be on the shoreside sometime in May of this year,” said Mark Cam, senior investigator at the MCA.
He said the MCA would look to examine the Bayesian, which is currently lying on its right side at a depth of around 50 metres, and the subsequent investigation of the yacht and its data would take “many months”.
Senior Coroner Nigel Parsley asked him if it would be fair to say that because the MCA was a long way from finalising its criminal inquiries, the inquest process was also unlikely to complete for many months.
“I would believe that would be the case sir, yes,” Cam said.
(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Ros Russell)
