Less than half a percent of all criminal cases in federal court end in acquittal, so billionaire Mike Lynch and his co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain seemed to be the luckiest of the unlucky on June 6 of this year when they were found not guilty of fraud charges that could have carried a prison sentence of 25 years.
But a month after that exuberant moment on the 17th floor of the federal courthouse in San Francisco, her fate took a tragic turn.
On Saturday, Chamberlain suffered fatal injuries when he was hit by a car while jogging near his home in England.
And on Monday, Lynch was among six people missing after a tornado-like waterspout sank the 184-foot sailing yacht Bayesian as it was anchored half a mile off the coast of Sicily. Lynch’s younger daughter, 18-year-old Hannah, a poetry student at Oxford, was also missing. So was one of the defense attorneys in the case, former federal prosecutor Christopher Morvillo, and his wife.
“After 48 hours, I still can’t comprehend what happened, but both of our clients and Chris and his wife are dead,” law partner Gary Lincenberg told Business Insider.
A paper trail suggests the ill-fated yacht belongs to Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, and is apparently named after Bayesian inference, a probabilistic approach that was both the focus of Lynch’s PhD thesis and the basis of the software that made him Britain’s first tech billionaire.
The fact that Lynch ever received a doctorate from Cambridge was itself improbable. He is the son of Irish immigrants. His mother was an intensive care nurse in County Tipperary. His father was a fireman in County Cork and advised Lynch against a career that involved charging into burning buildings. Lynch was clever enough to win scholarships to an exclusive private school and later to university. His genius lay not so much in technology itself but in its application.
He was involved in machine learning before it was fashionable and co-founded a number of start-ups, including Autonomy Technology, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11.7 billion in 2011 after a secret meeting with top executives. Hewlett-Packard’s then-CEO Léo Apotheker had hoped to transform the company from a struggling computer hardware junkyard into a highly profitable software giant. He ended up losing $8 billion on the merged companies.
The new CEO, Meg Whitman, alleged that Lynch and others at Autonomy had falsified the books before the sale to make the company appear more profitable than it actually was. Hewlett-Packard sued Lynch in England in 2019 and he spent 20 days testifying. Then, in early 2022, Judge Robert Hildyard issued a 1,700-page ruling finding that Lynch and Autonomy committed fraud. Prosecutors sought $4 billion in damages, which have not yet been determined.
At the same time, U.S. federal authorities attempted to extradite Lynch on criminal charges. Lynch fought this for two years until he arrived in San Francisco in chains in May 2023. He was released on $100 million bail and placed under house arrest in a tenement building with cameras installed in every room and two armed guards on duty 24 hours a day.
The judge in San Francisco was Charles Breyer, brother of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Charles had also presided over the trial of Lynch’s right-hand man, Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain, on fraud charges in the same courtroom a few months earlier. Hussain had been convicted. Lynch and Chamberlain seemed almost certain to suffer the same fate, with their own trial beginning in March 2024.
British businessman Mike Lynch leaves the High Court in London, Great Britain on March 25, 2019.
Henry Nicholls/Reuters
As prosecutors worked through seemingly endless pieces of evidence gathered from 15 million financial documents and emails obtained for the case, one juror repeatedly nodded off.
“I know it’s not fascinating, but you have to tell me if you can stay awake for another eight weeks during this testimony,” Breyer said, according to The times.
“That’s negative,” the juror replied. “I can’t do that.”
The juror was replaced by an alternate juror and the case continued with Lynch testifying on his own behalf. He said his first job was cleaning floors at the hospital where his mother works.
“I’m still a devilish mop,” he testified.
He also described what it was like to live as an Irishman in England during the war with the IRA.
“You had to learn to run fast,” he said.
When the decision to sell Autonomy was made, Hewlett-Packard was so keen to complete the deal that it offered twice the acquisition price, he said.
“The normal premium on the London market was about 30 percent,” he said. “HP offered 60 percent. That would be like trying to stop a herd of elephants if you needed shareholder approval to do it.”
His lawyer Chris Morvillo asked what the trial had been like for him.
“It’s surreal,” Lynch testified. “I’ve heard comments from people that just don’t paint the picture of the company that I, my colleagues and friends have worked for for 15 years.”
Lynch added: “I sat there and watched a number of witnesses I had never met in person, and some of them I may have just shaken hands with. And I heard about a number of transactions that I had nothing to do with.”
At the end of the eleven-week trial, the jury acquitted Lynch and Chamberlain of all charges. Morvillo joined them in tearful joy at being one of the lucky few.
Chamberlain’s luck ran out on Saturday when he was fatally involved in a collision with a car. Lynch and Morvillo were on the Bayesian at 4:30 a.m. Monday when the freak storm suddenly struck. A distress flare went off in the darkness, but the boat had sunk by the time help arrived. The cook’s body was recovered, but there was no sign of six others, including Lynch and his daughter and Morvillo and his wife.
Fifteen of the passengers and crew were rescued. Among them was Lynch’s wife, one-year-old Sophia, and her mother, Charlotte Golunski, a partner in another Lynch company, Invoke Capital. The mother described her ordeal to the Italian press, saying she was on deck when the raging storm ripped the child from her arms.
“For two seconds I lost my baby in the sea,” said the mother Sicilian Newspaper“Then I immediately hugged her again in the midst of the roaring waves.”
She provoked a mother’s anger.
“I held her above water with all my strength and stretched my arms up to prevent her from drowning. It was very dark. I couldn’t keep my eyes open in the water. I screamed for help, but all I heard around me were the screams of the others.”
A man in an inflatable lifeboat pulled her and Sophia to safety. The child’s father joined them. And now they were the luckiest of Monday’s unlucky ones.
