One day after five more bodies were recovered from the sinking of British billionaire Mike Lynch’s superyacht, Italian authorities officially identified Lynch and four others as the victims.
The Italian coast guard said Thursday the five bodies recovered were Lynch, NYC lawyer Chris Morvillo, his wife Neda Morvillo, Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy Bloomer, according to Sky News.
Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, remained missing as divers continued searching the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Sicily. The ship’s cook, Recaldo Thomas, was found dead hours after the sinking.
Lynch and 21 others were on board the 184-foot yacht Bayesian early Monday morning anchored off the coast of Porticello in Sicily. They were reportedly celebrating Lynch’s recent acquittal in a criminal fraud trial in San Francisco, where he was represented by Morvillo and supported by Bloomer.
Before dawn Monday, the ship was struck by a freak waterspout, sending it to the depths almost immediately, according to authorities. Fifteen people survived and were rescued by a nearby sailboat, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, the yacht’s official owner.
The boss of the ship’s manufacturer, Giovanni Costantino, told Sky News the yacht should’ve been “unsinkable” because of its construction.
However, the ship went down while a nearby sailboat, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, rode out the storm and rescued the Bayesian’s survivors from a lifeboat. Both Italian and British authorities are investigating, as the ship sailed under the British flag.
Lynch joined the billionaire ranks after selling his software company, Autonomy Corp., to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011. HP and U.S. federal prosecutors claimed Lynch cooked the company’s books to inflate its value, but Lynch and Morvillo successfully argued at trial that HP’s failures were its own fault.
With News Wire Services
