One man has died and British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his teenage daughter are among six people missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily following a violent storm.

Authorities in Italy said divers, boats and a helicopter continued searching for the missing on Monday, but no one was found.

While the names of the dead and missing were not immediately released, the Reuters news agency reported a person with knowledge of the operation confirmed Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were not accounted for.

The 56-metre-long yacht named Bayesian was carrying 22 people and had been anchored near the port of Porticello, the Italian coast guard said.

Fifteen people escaped from the boat before it went down, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares, who owns the yacht.

The sunken vessel is now at a depth of around 50 metres but an inspection by divers was hampered by limited access to the ship's interior, the Italian fire brigade said.

A coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters winds in the area had been "very strong".

"Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude," they said.

Officials confirmed the missing had British, American, and Canadian nationalities.


The 56-metre-long yacht Bayesian, owned by Lynch's wife, sunk off the coast of Sicily. Photo: Perini Navi / Supplied

Lynch, aged 59, is best known for co-founding British data analytics and enterprise search company Autonomy, which was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for more than $17 billion ($US11 billion).

Lynch was estimated to have made around $1.2 billion ($US800 million) in the deal, but spent much of the past decade in court after HP accused him of fraud.

Disappearance follows aquittal in criminal fraud case

HP has argued for years that Lynch over-inflated Autonomy’s value prior to its sale, but the businessman had denied any wrongdoing.

Lynch testified again in a criminal trial in San Francisco earlier this year that he believed HP bungled the takeover of Autonomy and had used him as a scapegoat.

He was acquitted by the jury in June this year and had pledged to return to the United Kingdom.

The BBC reported the sinking of the Bayesian took place just days after Lynch's co-defendant in that criminal fraud case, Stephen Chamberlain, died after being hit by a car in England on Saturday.

Lynch was still awaiting a decision to be made about the amount in damages owed to HP after the company largely won a civil case against him in 2022.

HP claimed Lynch and Autonomy’s chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain “artificially inflated Autonomy's reported revenues, revenue growth and gross margins" in that civil case.

Hussain was convicted in the US in 2018 of wire fraud and other crimes related to Autonomy’s sale and was jailed for five years.

Lynch created Autonomy after obtaining a PhD in adaptive pattern recognition from Cambridge University.

His skills and success saw him often compared with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Lynch was awarded an OBE (Office of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for services to enterprise in 2006, and founded technology investment firm Invoke Capital in 2012, which invested in numerous European artificial intelligence companies.

The firm had not commented on Lynch’s disappearance at the time of publication.