An Italian official stated that Jonathan Plummer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, was among those missing after a yacht carrying British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm.
Salvatore Cocina, the head of Sicily’s civil protection agency, reported that Plummer and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, were among the six missing individuals. Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were also unaccounted for as of late Monday.
The update came as news broke that Lynch’s co-defendant in a U.S. trial over the sale of his software company to Hewlett-Packard had died after being hit by a car in England, according to the Guardian, which was cited by Al Arabiya Business.
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The Italian coast guard had earlier stated that the British-flagged, 56-meter sailing ship "Baizian" was carrying 22 people and was anchored off the coast near the port of Porticello when it was struck by a hurricane in the early hours of Monday morning.
One person, believed to be the ship's chief chef, has been confirmed dead. The coast guard reported that the missing individuals were British, American, and Canadian nationals.
Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch's wife, Angela Bakaris, who owned the ship, and a one-year-old girl who was rescued by her mother.
A spokesperson for Lynch, the co-founder of Autonomy, a software company that became one of the UK's most prominent technology firms, declined to comment. Survivors indicated that the trip had been organized by Lynch for his co-workers.
Lynch, once referred to as the British Bill Gates, has spent much of the past decade in court defending his name against fraud allegations related to the $11 billion sale of his software company, Autonomy, to U.S. technology company Hewlett-Packard.
The 59-year-old was acquitted by a San Francisco jury in June, after spending more than a year living under virtual house arrest.
Hours after news of the ship’s sinking surfaced, it was reported that his co-defendant in that trial, Stephen Chamberlain, had died after being hit by a car while jogging in Cambridgeshire.
Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former vice president of finance, was struck on Saturday morning and was on life support, Reuters reported. Chamberlain’s lawyer, Gary Linsenberg, stated that he died after being “fatally struck by a vehicle” while jogging.
The Italian coast guard said rescue divers were attempting on Monday to reach the hull of the "Baizian," which had been carrying 10 crew members and 12 passengers.
The boat sank to a depth of about 49 meters (150 feet), and the prosecutor's office in Termini Imerese is investigating the incident.
"The wind was very strong. The weather was expected to be bad, but not this bad," a coastguard official in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, told Reuters.
A nearby boat captain told Reuters that when the wind picked up, he turned on the engine to control his vessel and avoid colliding with the "Baizian," which was moored alongside.
"We managed to keep our vessel in place, and after the storm passed, we noticed that the vessel behind us had disappeared," Carsten Borner told reporters. The other boat "turned over and sank," he said.
He added that his crew found some survivors on a lifeboat - including a baby girl and her mother - and brought them aboard the yacht before the coastguard picked them up.
Eight of those rescued, including the one-year-old girl, were taken to hospitals, all of whom were reported to be in stable condition.
"The baby is fine. The mother is also doing well, though with some minor scratches. The father will be discharged soon," said Domenico Cipolla, chief medical officer at the Di Cristina hospital in Palermo, where the one-year-old girl and her mother were admitted.
The survivors, mostly colleagues who worked with Lynch, were deeply shocked. "As time goes on, they are increasingly aware that they have lost many friends this morning," Cipolla added.
The New Zealand foreign ministry confirmed that two New Zealanders were on board the yacht.
New Zealand lawyer Ayla Ronald has been named as one of the survivors. Her father, Lyn Ronald, told the Guardian that his daughter was fine but traumatized after the incident.
Ronald, who works for international law firm Clifford Chance, was working in London on Lynch's long-running fraud case, her father said.
Experts noted that the storms and heavy rains that have swept across Italy in recent days followed weeks of scorching heat that pushed the Mediterranean Sea to record levels, increasing the risk of extreme weather.
"The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), which is about 3 degrees above normal. This creates a huge source of energy that contributes to these storms," meteorologist Luca Mercalli told Reuters.
"We can't say that it's all due to global warming, but we can say that it has an amplifying effect," Mercalli added.