Speaking shortly after being acquitted of fraud in America in June, UK businessman Mike Lynch said the verdict – the probability of which was purported to be just 0.5 per cent – was so unexpected, he felt like he had ‘jumped universes’.
‘If this had gone the wrong way,’ he said, ‘it would have been the end of life as I have known it.’
In a different universe to this one, the tech billionaire, dubbed ‘the British Bill Gates’, would have spent this week on his 2,300-acre Suffolk estate, tending to his beloved Red Poll cattle, sheep and Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs.
He’d start each morning with a long, hot bath – ‘thinking time’ he called it – before taking the family’s two dachshunds and four sheepdogs for a walk in the autumn sunshine.
This weekend, Mike and his wife, Angela, and their two daughters, Hannah, 18, and Esme, 21, would have been at Cliveden Literary Festival in Berkshire, where he was due to give an address on artificial intelligence and the future of technology.
He and Angela had attended the festival for many years, having taken Hannah – a dazzling young woman with a passion for poetry – to hear some of her favourite authors speak.
In a few weeks’ time, they would be driving her to Trinity College, Oxford, where she had won a place to read English Literature, their hearts bursting with pride. But none of this was to be.
Instead, Angela Lynch, 57, finds herself in this universe, a truly unbearable one, in which her husband and younger daughter are both dead. Just over a month has now passed since the pair were among seven people killed when the family’s £30 million yacht, Bayesian, sank off the coast of Sicily after being struck by a powerful wind during a violent storm in the early hours of the morning.
Myriad questions remain about how a vessel deemed ‘unsinkable’ by its manufacturers could have gone down so quickly. Three crew members, including the captain, are under investigation for possible manslaughter, and divers are still painstakingly trawling the wreckage for clues.
Horrifying details have also emerged about how Hannah and Mike, along with four others found below deck, spent their final moments.
‘The storm hit hard, placing them in the melee of flying furniture, glass and other items,’ said Stephen Edwards, who captained the yacht for five years until 2020 and has spoken with traumatised crew members who – like Angela – survived the tragedy.
‘Inside the cabins… people were lying in their beds one minute, and the next the room was on its side, totally dark, with the door now either in the floor or in the ceiling above.’
Angela and the Lynches’ elder daughter, Esme, who was not on the trip, have also had to confront shocking medical findings, which showed the six victims of the disaster whose bodies were recovered from the yacht (the seventh was found in the sea) had no water in their lungs, suggesting the cause of death was suffocation due to a lack of oxygen.
Mike and Hannah’s bodies have now been flown back to England by private jet, but as they plan funerals back home, this grieving family’s pain has been compounded further. For hanging over Angela is a new $4 billion
(£3.02 billion) damages claim from US technology giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) against her husband’s estate.
Before his death aged 59, Mike had been embroiled in a transatlantic fraud case, the result of the 2011 sale of his tech group, Autonomy, in which the buyer, HPE, alleged ‘accounting irregularities’ had led to Lynch and his associates fraudulently inflating the price. Although he’d been cleared of wrongdoing in the US criminal trial, the opposite result was reached in civil proceedings in the UK: in 2022, a High Court judge had ruled he likely knew about ‘impropriety’ in the company and was therefore liable for damages.
There had been speculation HPE would not pursue the claim. But earlier this month, citing ‘difficult decisions’, the company’s CEO, Antonio Neri, confirmed it would be going ahead. ‘We are making decisions in the best interest of the shareholders,’ he said. ‘The reality of what happened does not change what occurred in the past decade or so, where we believe wrongdoing was done.’
The news sent shockwaves through the business community, with Mike’s former colleagues and friends slamming the company as ‘heartless’. Angela is said to be stunned.
‘The CEO of HPE talks about hard choices,’ said a very close friend of the family, speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday.
‘“Hard choices” are deciding which coffins to bury your husband and 18-year-old daughter in. There are also easy choices, such as ending this relentless civil action with a settlement and ceasing to terrorise a grieving widow.’
Nearly five weeks on from that terrible night off the Sicilian coast, friends say Angela cannot stop crying. She returned to Loudham Hall, the 16th-century farmhouse in Suffolk where the family – who also have a London home in Chelsea – spend most of their time, two weeks after the disaster.
Locals have seen her in the nearby village of Pettistree in a wheelchair, still recovering from deep gashes to her feet caused by shards of glass on the sinking yacht. Andrew Kanter, a technology industry veteran and long-time family friend who attended the Lynches’ wedding in 2001, has been spending as much time as possible with Angela and Esme. They are, he says, coping ‘with the tragedy as well as anyone could hope for’.
‘I still struggle that my friend and colleague, who I spoke with almost every day for a quarter century, is not on the other end of a phone or a text,’ he told the MoS.
Simone Finn, the former Tory deputy chief of staff who has known the Lynches for eight years, credits Angela’s strength of character for enduring these dark times. A first-generation American, born to Colombian parents, Angela – a shrewd businesswoman who works under her maiden name Bacares – had assiduously stayed out of the limelight throughout her husband’s legal ordeal.
‘Angela, like Mike, came from a working-class background, fought hard for what she had, and she’s proud of that,’ says Baroness Finn.
‘They were so proud of the girls’ successes, too. Esme’s the scientist like her dad – he would tell anyone who’d listen: “My daughter has gone to do physics at Imperial [College London].” And they were so thrilled about Hannah getting a place at Oxford.’
Hannah, a luminous, intelligent young woman who won countless academic prizes at Latymer Upper School in west London, had worked so hard to get to Oxford.
‘She lit up the classroom,’ recalls Jon Mitropoulos-Monk, Latymer’s head of English. ‘She loved literature, learning and life.’
Hannah had joined her parents aboard the yacht to celebrate getting top A-level grades on August 15, just four days before her death. A strong swimmer, she was overheard by crew members telling her parents that if they got into trouble on the water, she’d save them. Patrick Jacob, managing director of Anthem Corporate Finance, and a family friend of some 15 years, says such selflessness came naturally to Hannah, whose loss is ‘unbearable’.
Hannah and Esme, a keen member of her university’s sailing team, loved spending time aboard the family’s 183ft-yacht, which Mike bought in 2014 and named after Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century mathematician whose work on probability influenced his professional thinking.
Last month’s scenic tour of the Gulf of Naples was one they’d made before. Bayesian left the Sicilian port of Cefalu before dropping anchor at Porticello, a fishing hamlet further west, at 7.25pm on August 18.
Nobody knows exactly what occurred around 5am the following morning. Locals blame a ‘downburst’, a tornado-like wind – a common occurrence but rarely one with fatal results.
Various theories – access hatches left open, a lightning strike destabilising the towering, 246ft mast, improper anchorage – have been put forward, but investigators have not yet come to any conclusions. Divers are still searching the wreckage, 160ft underwater, for data-storage devices and video recordings that may shed some light.
The Italian Sea Group, which built the Bayesian superyacht, is set to sue the crew and widow of Mike Lynch weeks after the ship went down in a storm.
A lawyer for the company has reportedly filed papers signalling its intention to sue for damages to the boat of up to £186 million.
The action suggests the boat’s sinking will cause the firm reputational damage and loss of earnings, the Sunday Times reported.
But, after details of the action were reported, the manufacturer said it had not ‘authorised’ its lawyer to pursue it.
They added that the claim has ordered to be withdrawn.
Angela is believed to have escaped because, woken by a ‘tilting’ of the yacht, she went on deck to find out what was going on. Ex-captain Stephen Edwards says this was typical: ‘She is always the first person to come up to the bridge if she hears us scuttling about. That could explain why she was saved and Mike wasn’t.’
Back home, friends say Angela remains racked with guilt that, somehow, she survived.
This is a woman who spent more than a decade fiercely protecting her daughters – aged just nine and six when fraud charges were first brought against Mike – from the anguish of their father’s case.
‘Shortly before he died, he messaged me, saying how wonderful it was to finally sleep peacefully,’ says Patrick Jacob. ‘For all those years, he said he would wake up only to be overwhelmed by the crushing weight of what he faced. He was writing to describe the joy of… feeling his zest for life return.’
Mike told an interviewer in July that he planned to use his freedom to appeal the High Court decision, as well as funding an organisation to help individuals fight wrongful convictions. It wasn’t so much the damages (the exact figure for which has yet to be determined) that bothered him, he said – he and Angela had a combined fortune of £852million, after all – but the principle of being found to have done wrong.
Reputation mattered to him; so much so that he insisted on giving evidence at his trial in San Francisco, a rarity in white-collar fraud cases, and seemingly won jurors over simply by being himself.
Such was his enthusiasm about his animals back home that at one point he was rebuked by the judge, who said the court had heard ‘enough farm stories’.
As for the apparent villain in this story, sources in the business world say HPE, a publicly-listed company, is bound by fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of its shareholders. A decision not to pursue Mike’s estate for damages, which have been sanctioned by a UK court, could be viewed as acting against those interests, leading the shareholders to sue.
But to the Lynches’ friends and family, this is no excuse.
‘HP[E] is a commercial enterprise, but if they pursue Mike’s family after all his wife and elder daughter have had to endure, they are an utter disgrace and don’t deserve any success,’ says Tony Quested, an old friend and chief executive of Cambridge-based news outlet Business Weekly.
Patrick Jacob agrees. ‘Before the bodies are even laid to rest, they’ve already begun circling like vultures, demonstrating a complete lack of humanity.’
In Suffolk, the place where Mike – who grew up in Essex – felt most at home, talk is not of business but of the man behind it. Here, they will miss the biannual parties – one in June and a dinner at Christmas – at Loudham Hall, at which you’d find everyone from local farmers to lords.
‘It was always humbling to be invited… and find oneself sitting, for example, between the head of the BBC and a local potter,’ recalls Andrew Kanter.
Locals remember Mike as a storyteller, music lover and ardent James Bond fan who liked a pint in the village pub. Dick Smith, 84, who lives in Pettistree, bonded with Mike over their shared love of Red Poll cattle. ‘He did love his animals,’ he recalls. ‘There were no airs and graces with him at all.’
This, say friends, was Mike through and through – a man of magnetic warmth and humility, who never forgot his roots; all traits he instilled in Hannah.
Answers about what happened on the yacht, or who is to blame, are likely to provide little comfort to Angela and Esme, who face milestone after agonising milestone – not to mention the shadow of a multi-billion-pound lawsuit – without their loved ones. The agony of this grieving mother and daughter truly knows no bounds.
l Additional reporting by Silvia Marchetti and Stephanie Condron