Another titan of industry has been named among the six people still missing after a luxury yacht was swallowed by the waves off the coast of Italy on Monday.
Morgan Stanley International bank chair Jonathan Bloomer is unaccounted for after the 184-foot sailing vessel Bayesian was suddenly sunk by a tornadic waterspout, a rotating pillar of mist and air, about half a mile from the Sicilian shore.
The other missing persons include U.K. tech magnate Mike Lynch, 59, whose wife owned the boat, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, and Chris Morvillo, an anti-corruption lawyer with Clifford Chance. The remaining two people, reportedly the wives of Bloomer and Morvillo, have not yet been identified.
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Morvillo had represented Lynch in his battle to clear his name of fraud over the $12 billion sale of his company Autonomy Technology to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. Bloomer, who chaired Autonomy’s audit committee some years before joining Morgan Stanley, had also given evidence at an earlier stage in the years-long legal saga.
It’s been reported that Lynch had invited members of his legal team out on the yacht to celebrate his recent triumph at trial earlier in June, at which he’d been facing more than 20 years behind bars. Still, the disappearance of the billionaire, his lawyer, and one of their witnesses only adds to the bizarre series of events that have followed hot on the heels of their shock victory, itself all the more extraordinary for the fact less than 1 percent of all federal criminal cases end in acquittal.
Just hours after the Bayesian went down, Lynch’s former vice president at Autonomy and co-defendant in the recent trial, Stephen Chamberlain, died in a U.K. hospital after succumbing to injuries sustained when he was hit by a car while out jogging on Saturday afternoon.
Prosecutors had accused Lynch and Chamberlain of committing massive fraud in cooking Autonomy’s books to make it look more profitable ahead of the sale to Hewlett-Packard. After civil proceedings in the U.K. had awarded some $4 billion in damages against the pair in 2022, federal authorities in U.S. filed to extradite Lynch on criminal charges, which he fought until eventually being brought over in May 2023.
One of Lynch’s other former lieutenants, Sushovan Hussain, had already been convicted in the scheme, and so there were tears of relief when Lynch and Chamberlain walked out of court free men at the end of their 11-week trial on June 6.
As of Tuesday morning the search for Lynch and the others missing from the capsized ship was ongoing. Fifteen passengers have already been rescued, including a 1-year-old baby girl.
One among the survivors is Ayla Ronald, 36, a Clifford Chance lawyer from New Zealand who also worked on Lynch’s fraud case. Ronald’s father Lin has spoken with 9News about his daughter’s ordeal, saying she was “very shocked at the moment” and adding he could only say at this stage she had texted him that “there are deaths, and she and her partner are alive.”
So far only a single body, of the vessel’s Canadian chef, has been recovered from the wreck.
