Once dubbed Britain's "Bill Gates," tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, whose body has been recovered from his sunken superyacht off Sicily, had only recently been cleared of fraud charges in the U.S.

The 59-year-old businessman was acquitted in June by a San Francisco court after a decade-long legal battle with U.S. firm Hewlett-Packard, but the allegations tarnished his image as a UK tech success story.

Since returning home, Lynch - an advisor to two UK prime ministers - had criticized the government for allowing his extradition to the U.S. in the first place.

"I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field," he said following his acquittal.

But in a tragic twist, he would perish on the Mediterranean celebrating his victory on a cruise with his family and the friends who had helped him through the ordeal.

'Enough money not to be swept away'

Born to working-class Irish parents in Essex, east of London, in 1965, the academically bright Lynch won a scholarship to a private school.

He went on to study natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he got a doctorate.

Lynch had described the fraud trial in the U.S. as a life-altering moment for him in an interview with the Times newspaper last month.

"It's bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?" he said.

Following his U.S. acquittal, he had been critical of his prosecution in the United States. 

He had told the BBC that the only reason he was free was "because I had enough money not to be swept away by a process that's set up to sweep you away."

Lynch and his family were aboard his luxury yacht 'Bayesian' near Palermo with friends and colleagues when it was struck by a sudden storm in the early hours of August 19.

His wife, Angela Bacares, was among the 15 people rescued, but his daughter Hannah, 18, is still missing.

Italian rescuers have now recovered five bodies, and her fate remains unconfirmed.

Lynch and his wife, who also had an older daughter aged 21, had a combined fortune of £500 million ($648 million) according to the latest Sunday Times "Rich List."

The odds of such a yacht being capsized by a weather event while anchored were almost nonexistent, as it had never happened before. 

Stewart Campbell, editor-in-chief of Boat International, expressed disbelief on BBC's Newsnight, stating, "The industry is as shocked as I am - this just doesn't happen."

Bayesian mathematics

Lynch, a leading advocate and educator of Bayesian mathematics at his alma mater, Cambridge University, named his boat after Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century statistician and Presbyterian minister from Tunbridge Wells. 

Bayesian mathematics challenges the conventional fixed framework for predicting unusual outcomes - like freak weather events - by emphasizing the need for continuous updates with new data as situations evolve. This approach is also foundational to the current surge in Artificial Intelligence, a field in which Lynch was a trailblazer.

Lynch owed much of his wealth to his software firm Autonomy, which he founded in 1996 in Cambridge and turned into a leading British tech company.

Autonomy's search software was informed by Bayesian learning frameworks.

Lynch sold Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard, HP, a U.S. multinational information technology company, for $11 billion in 2011 in a mega-deal which raised eyebrows at the time. 

Just one year later, HP reported a write-down of $8.8 billion - including more than $5 billion it attributed to alleged inflated data from Autonomy - plunging Lynch into the fraud case he spent over a decade fighting.

U.S. prosecutors accused him of taking part in a massive scheme as Autonomy's chief executive to deceive HP by pumping the value of the company.

Lynch was extradited last year and spent a year under house arrest before being cleared.

He could have faced two decades in jail, an ordeal the entrepreneur said he would not have survived due to various medical conditions.

Lynch - who made around $815 million from the Autonomy sale - always denied the fraud charges, accusing HP of making him a scapegoat for its own failings.

'A life of beating the odds'

In a further twist of fate, Lynch's co-defendant in the U.S. trial, Stephen Chamberlain, was killed by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire just days before. 

The likelihood of both defendants dying within days of each other is beyond comprehension. While these events may be a cluster of tragic coincidences, they are sure to spark conspiracy theories for years to come.

Russian journalist Ilya Ber highlighted the coincidence in a Facebook post, pointing out that the UK's investigation into when HP accused "the man [Lynch], as well as the company's financial director [Chamberlain], of fraud" led to the conclusion that "[Lynch] was involved in technology, strategy and visionary work, and he might not have known what happened with the finances. But the Americans did not let up and in 2016 opened prosecution of both at the place of registration of the affected applicants."

Lynch was honored by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006 with an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to enterprise and appointed to the board of the BBC the same year.

After the Autonomy sale, he founded venture capital firm Invoke Capital, which was an early investor in cyber security firm Darktrace.

However, despite the U.S. acquittal this year, the legal saga was not over for Lynch.

In 2022, London's High Court ruled in a civil fraud case that HP had been duped and had overpaid for Autonomy. 

The court has yet to rule on the billions of dollars in damages claimed by the U.S. group.

David Yelland, a reputation management advisor who described Lynch as a client and friend, said in an X post it was "devastating" to think he had lost his life just as he had began to rebuild it.

"His entire life is one of beating the odds in the most extraordinary of situations," Yelland added.

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