Guests were celebrating the acquittal of Mike Lynch, the British tech entrepreneur, on the superyacht Bayesian when the vessel sank off the coast of Italy.
One person has died and six others, including four British nationals, are missing after the Bayesian capsized at around 5am on Monday. Mr Lynch is among the missing after the boat sank in a tornado off the village of Porticello, in Palermo, Sicily.
One mother aboard the yacht, who survived the sinking, said she had held her baby child aloft to save her from drowning.
Mr Lynch had gathered guests from Clifford Chance, the legal firm, and Invoke Capital, his own company, after being cleared in June of fraud over the multi billion-dollar sale of Autonomy.
He was found not guilty on all counts of an accusation of inflating the value of the company, which he sold to the US tech giant Hewlett-Packard for £8.6 billion in 2011.
The father of a Clifford Chance lawyer who survived the sinking confirmed that the trip had been intended as a celebration of the court victory.
Lin Ronald said his daughter Ayla, 36, is a lawyer who was part of the successful legal team who were invited to go sailing
Mr Ronald said: “I have texted with my daughter and she hasn’t given me any updates about missing personnel or saved personnel. She has only said to me that there are deaths, and she and her partner are alive.
There were 15 survivors, rescued by the Italian coast guard from a life raft put to sea as the 183ft yacht went down.
Among the survivors was a one-year-old British baby called Sofia who was saved by her mother, named by one Italian newspaper as Charlotte Golunski.
Ms Golunski, an Oxford graduate and a senior associate at Invoke, fought to prevent her child from drowning.
She told Republicca: “I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning. It was all dark. In the water I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I screamed for help but all I could hear around me was the screams of others.”
Mother and baby were saved when they were able to get on to a lifeboat with others.
Speaking from the Giovanni di Cristina paediatric hospital in Palermo, she said she “can still hear her little girl crying in her ears as they floated in the waves and their holiday sailing boat sank”. She said she was amazed that the child, who had just turned one, had emerged from the water unscathed.
The violent storm had struck without warning. The Bayesian had been moored offshore from Porticello. It had sailed to Porticello from Cefalu, another historic seaside village on Sicliy’s northern shore.
Pietro Asciutto, a fisherman who watched the disaster unfold from his home in Porticello, told a local news agency: “I was at home when the tornado hit. I immediately closed all the windows.
“Then I saw the boat. It had only one mast, it was very large. I saw it sink suddenly.
“I think the tornado came from Porticello. Shortly after I went down to the Bay of Santa Nicolicchia to get a better look at what was happening. The boat was still floating, then suddenly it disappeared. I saw it sink with my own eyes.”
As the yacht began to sink, a member of the crew fired a distress flare, its red trail alerting boats nearby.
Karsten Borner, a captain on a Dutch-flagged sailing ship also moored off Porticello, went to the rescue, pulling survivors from the lifeboat. He had at first struggled to keep his own yacht under control as the storm hit.
“This morning we got this strong hurricane gust and we had to start the engine to keep the ship in an angled position, and we watched the ship behind us not to touch them and we managed to keep the ship in position, and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone,” said Mr Borner.
“And then we saw a red flare, so my first mate and I went to the position, and we found this life raft drifting.
“Fifteen people inside. Four people were injured, three heavily injured, and we brought them to our ship. Then we communicated with the coast guard, and after some time the coast guard came and later picked up injured people.”
Emergency divers, according to the local rescue centre in Sicily, found wreckage at a depth of 187ft, where “through the portholes they saw corpses”.
Vigili del Fuoco, Italy’s fire and rescue service, confirmed the body of a male had been recovered from the yacht. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, it said the “lifeless body of a man [has been] recovered from the wreck by the divers.”
It posted the statement alongside a clip of the rescue effort with footage showing helicopters, boats and divers carrying out a search operation.
Investigators will now try to work out why the Bayesian sank when other ships in the vicinityremained afloat. The yacht had the world’s tallest aluminium mast at almost 250ft.
It is owned by Revtom, a company registered on the Isle of Man. According to company documents filed in April, Revtom’s legal owner is Angela Bacares, Mr Lynch’s wife.
A former chief stewardess who had previously crewed the Bayesian said the boat had always previously withstood the choppiest of seas.
Monica Jensen, 48, told The Telegraph: “It seems a bit strange. We have been in bad weather with it, crossed the Atlantic. It’s been all over. These things definitely don’t happen very often.”
Ms Jensen worked on the superyacht from November 2018 to October 2020 for a private owner, and said it had since been sold. She was with it on two Caribbean seasons and cruised around Italy, Malta, Greece and the Balearics.
Shen said the crew would have been well-drilled on the evacuation process, adding: “You can’t work on a boat without the right certificates, training and you do drills monthly.”
In a statement, the Italian coast guard said: “This morning at about 5am, following a violent gale, a 56-metre yacht named Bayesian and flying the UK flag sank off Porticello.
“The first shipwrecked were rescued by a boat in the immediate vicinity and brought ashore by four coast guard vessels, which promptly responded to the scene from Porticello, Termini Imerese and Palermo.
“Initial information received from the yacht crew indicated that 22 people, 10 crew members and 12 passengers, were on board the yacht. There are currently 15 people rescued and seven missing, one crew member and six passengers, of British, American and Canadian nationality.
“Of the people recovered, eight were transported to local hospitals. The vessel is reported to have sunk on a seabed of about 50 metres. The search continues unabated with naval, air and underwater resources, including the Messina coast guard diving unit.”
Bartolomeo Lo Coco, who owns the Tosto Chiosco cafe in Porticello, said it was common for rental yachts and boats to sail through the fishing village, adding that the captain should not be blamed for what had occurred because the weather had been so unpredictable.
“This was a terrible misfortune that no one could have foreseen. It is nobody’s fault, the captain should not be blamed,” he said. “We are in mourning here, all of us are in mourning. We have never seen anything like this, ever. There is a very serious tragedy.”
His kiosk, which serves snacks and sandwiches, overlooks the water in Porticello. He said the tornado had not only caused the tragic accident, but also widespread damage in the port.
He added: “This wasn’t a thunderstorm, this was a whirlwind. It happened all of a sudden. There is a lot of damage here. Boats were dislodged from their moorings and restaurant tables were broken within minutes and sent flying several metres.”
