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The bodies of UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and four of his guests on the superyacht Bayesian have been recovered, three days after it sank off the coast of Sicily, according to Italian officials.
The officials said the bodies of Christopher Morvillo of the law firm Clifford Chance and Jonathan Bloomer, chair of insurance group Hiscox and Morgan Stanley International, alongside their wives, Neda Morvillo and Judy Bloomer, have been retrieved.
Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter Hannah is still missing, after Bayesian went down in an intense storm near Palermo on Monday.
The five bodies were pulled from the sunken yacht on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning. The body of Recaldo Thomas, the boat’s chef, had been retrieved earlier in the week.
The officials asked not to be named as they were not authorised to speak publicly.
No formal identification of the bodies has been announced by the local authorities. The Italian public prosecutor is charged with making the official determination of the deaths.
A representative for the Morvillo family spoke of their “tremendous loss”.
“We are completely devastated by the passing of Chris and Neda, and our collective hearts go out to all the families who have also been affected by this senseless tragedy,” they said.
A Bloomer family spokesperson described their “unimaginable grief”.
“Our parents were incredible people and an inspiration to many, but first and foremost they were focused on and loved their family,” they said. “Together for five decades, our only comfort is that they are still together now.”
A spokesperson for the Lynch family declined to comment.
David Tabizel, who co-founded Autonomy with Lynch, paid tribute to his “exhausting, exhilarating and incisive” friend, describing him as a “witty, loyal polymath with a mind like a razor blade”.
Brent Hoberman, the investor and entrepreneur who co-founded Lastminute.com and Founders Forum, said Lynch was a “pioneering titan of UK technology”. “He was an outlier and an original thinker,” he said.
Lord John Browne, former chief executive of BP, said Lynch “should be remembered as the person who catalysed a breed of deep tech entrepreneurs in the UK”.
Suranga Chandratillake, former US chief technology officer at Autonomy and now investor at Balderton Capital, called Lynch’s death an “incalculable loss to UK tech”.
The trip on Bayesian had been planned as a celebration of Lynch’s recent acquittal on US fraud charges, after a 12-year legal battle over the $11bn sale of his software group Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
Morvillo represented Lynch in his recent US case, and Bloomer appeared at the trial as a witness for the defence.
Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was one of 15 survivors rescued in the early hours of Monday morning.
Italian and UK authorities are investigating the exact circumstances of the shipwreck after some eyewitnesses claimed the yacht sank in just a matter of minutes.
Giovanni Costantino, chief executive of Italian Sea Group, which owns Bayesian’s manufacturers Perini Navi, told the Financial Times that the 56-metre, British-registered yacht was “absolutely safe”. ISG’s tracking data shows it took 16 minutes from the time Bayesian started dragging its anchor until it sank.
A team of divers has struggled for days to access the interior cabins of the 540-tonne yacht, due to the volume of debris inside a wreck that lies 50 metres below the surface.
Additional reporting by Caroline Binham