Sometimes described as the Bill Gates of Britain, Mike Lynch was missing after an award-winning yacht sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily early on Monday.
Born in the Essex town of Ilford to Irish parents, his father a fireman and his mother a nurse, Mr Lynch was one of the UK's most controversial business figures in recent years.
Last year's Sunday Times Rich List calculated that he and his wife, Angela Bacares, were worth £852 million.
Ms Bacares, 57, was among those rescued by Italian coastguard on Monday.
On Thursday, Italian coastguard officials officially identified Mr Lynch's body but said his 18-year-old daughter was still missing.
Mr Lynch had recently been cleared of wire fraud charges in California, following his extradition from Britain to the US last year.
Bayesian yacht sinks off Sicily – in pictures
The 59-year-old was acquitted in a San Francisco court in early June, having been accused of involvement in an $11.1 billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) more than a decade earlier.
That sale happened in 2011, and within a year HP executives were crying foul and accusing Autonomy of shady accounting practices. But while HP had to write down the value of the deal by more than $5 billion, Mr Lynch maintained his innocence.
The UK's Serious Fraud Office looked into the case and in January 2015 said that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with some parts of the case and handed the rest over to the US authorities.
As such, by early 2018 Autonomy's former chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, had been found guilty of fraud in the US and sentenced to five years in prison.
The US Department of Justice charged Mr Lynch with 17 counts of fraud and conspiracy in 2018 and 2019, claiming he had been at the wheel during an illegal effort to overinflate the true state of Autonomy’s revenue.
In 2019, HP launched a civil case against Mr Lynch in the UK, which came to a conclusion in 2022, with the judge finding in favour of HP, but saying the damages involved would be substantially less than $5 billion.
Extradition to the US
The judgment, however, opened the door to extradition proceedings, which began in February 2022 and led to Mr Lynch being extradited to California the following year. He was confined to a house in San Francisco while he awaited trial after posting a $100 million bond.
Alongside Mr Lynch, the former vice president of finance at Autonomy, Stephen Chamberlain, was also indicted, extradited and put on trial in the US on the same charges.
Following the sinking of the yacht Mr Lynch was aboard off the coast of Italy, it emerged that Mr Chamberlain had died two days earlier having been involved in a road accident in Cambridgeshire, England.
Italian officials also confirmed that Jonathan Bloomer, 70, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, was among those who died after going missing off the coast of Sicily.
A friend of Mr Lynch, Mr Bloomer had been celebrating the acquittal on the yacht when the fatal storm struck.
Mr Bloomer joined the board of the insurance giant Hiscox as non-executive chairman last year, and had appeared as a defence witness in Mr Lynch's legal battle with Hewlett-Packard.
Following his acquittal in early June this year, Mr Lynch was highly critical of his prosecution in the US.
In an interview with the BBC, he said fewer than one per cent of US federal cases like his end in acquittal and that he was free because he had “enough money not to be swept away by a process that's set up to sweep you away”.
“You shouldn't need to have funds to protect yourself as a British citizen”, he added.
Had Mr Lynch been convicted in the US, he faced spending the rest of his life in prison.
“I have various medical things that would have made it difficult to survive,” he told The Times after his acquittal and return to the UK.
“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life,” he said, “the question is, what do you want to do with it?”
Exactly what that was will now not be known, but immediately following his release in the US in early June he told reporters that he was looking forward to getting back to his family and “innovating in my field”.
Second act
No doubt this would have pioneering work in the technology sector, probably in artificial intelligence (AI), given his involvement with the legal AI company, Luminance, and the cybersecurity firm, Darktrace.
Mr Lynch was also planning to challenge the extradition treaty that led to him being led from his Suffolk home in handcuffs to a courtroom in California.
The treaty, which was updated in 2003 to give more strength to prosecutors wishing to extradite suspects from each other's territory, was used against David Bermingham, one of the so-called NatWest Three linked to the Enron scandal, who sentenced to 37 months in prison in 2008.
Mr Lynch told The Times the treaty needed serious revamping and that he was going to put money into creating a British organisation similar to the Innocence Project in the US, which seeks to free those wrongly convicted.
“It has to be wrong that a US prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England than the UK police do,” he said.
Computer pioneer
Many described Mr Lynch as a pioneer of artificial intelligence, as his doctoral thesis at Cambridge University concerned neural networks, an early form of machine learning.
He set up companies at the cutting edge of software technology in the late 1980s, including one which specialised in the early development of fingerprint recognition technology. By 1996 he had started Autonomy, which went on to become a significant force in the British IT industry within just a few years.
Much of the way Autonomy's software worked was based on the statistical methodology of Bayesian inference, which is related to early internet search engines.
The yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily that Mr Lynch and his wife were thought to have owned through a company in the Isle of Man was called “Bayesian”.
During the time of his legal battles, he also cofounded Darktrace, which was eventually taken over in April this year when US private equity firm Thoma Bravo bought it out in a £4.2 billion takeover deal.
Mr Lynch had argued that the controversies surrounding him had depressed Darktrace's share price to make it a takeover target.
After leaving Autonomy in 2012, Mr Chamberlain also worked as the chief operating officer (COO) at Darktrace.
His interests listed in Who's Who include jazz saxophone and preserving rare breeds of animals. He received an OBE in 2006 and is a fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society. He had also served on the boards of the BBC and the British Library.
LIGUE 1 FIXTURES
All times UAE ( 4 GMT)
Friday
Nice v Angers (9pm)
Lille v Monaco (10.45pm)
Saturday
Montpellier v Paris Saint-Germain (7pm)
Bordeaux v Guingamp (10pm)
Caen v Amiens (10pm)
Lyon v Dijon (10pm)
Metz v Troyes (10pm)
Sunday
Saint-Etienne v Rennes (5pm)
Strasbourg v Nantes (7pm)
Marseille v Toulouse (11pm)
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Sand storm
- Particle size: Larger, heavier sand grains
- Visibility: Often dramatic with thick "walls" of sand
- Duration: Short-lived, typically localised
- Travel distance: Limited
- Source: Open desert areas with strong winds
Dust storm
- Particle size: Much finer, lightweight particles
- Visibility: Hazy skies but less intense
- Duration: Can linger for days
- Travel distance: Long-range, up to thousands of kilometres
- Source: Can be carried from distant regions
Avengers: Endgame
Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Starring: Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Josh Brolin
4/5 stars
What can victims do?
Always use only regulated platforms
Stop all transactions and communication on suspicion
Save all evidence (screenshots, chat logs, transaction IDs)
Report to local authorities
Warn others to prevent further harm
Courtesy: Crystal Intelligence
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
How much do leading UAE’s UK curriculum schools charge for Year 6?
- Nord Anglia International School (Dubai) – Dh85,032
- Kings School Al Barsha (Dubai) – Dh71,905
- Brighton College Abu Dhabi - Dh68,560
- Jumeirah English Speaking School (Dubai) – Dh59,728
- Gems Wellington International School – Dubai Branch – Dh58,488
- The British School Al Khubairat (Abu Dhabi) - Dh54,170
- Dubai English Speaking School – Dh51,269
*Annual tuition fees covering the 2024/2025 academic year
PROFILE OF INVYGO
Started: 2018
Founders: Eslam Hussein and Pulkit Ganjoo
Based: Dubai
Sector: Transport
Size: 9 employees
Investment: $1,275,000
Investors: Class 5 Global, Equitrust, Gulf Islamic Investments, Kairos K50 and William Zeqiri
What is tokenisation?
Tokenisation refers to the issuance of a blockchain token, which represents a virtually tradable real, tangible asset. A tokenised asset is easily transferable, offers good liquidity, returns and is easily traded on the secondary markets.
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Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
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- Power: 640hp
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- On sale: 2026
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Earth under attack: Cosmic impacts throughout history
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- 50,000 years ago: 50m-wide iron meteor crashes in Arizona with the violence of 10 megatonne hydrogen bomb, creating the famous 1.2km-wide Barringer Crater
- 1490: Meteor storm over Shansi Province, north-east China when large stones “fell like rain”, reportedly leading to thousands of deaths.
- 1908: 100-metre meteor from the Taurid Complex explodes near the Tunguska river in Siberia with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs, devastating 2,000 square kilometres of forest.
- 1998: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 breaks apart and crashes into Jupiter in series of impacts that would have annihilated life on Earth.
-2013: 10,000-tonne meteor burns up over the southern Urals region of Russia, releasing a pressure blast and flash that left over 1600 people injured.
About Takalam
Date started: early 2020
Founders: Khawla Hammad and Inas Abu Shashieh
Based: Abu Dhabi
Sector: HealthTech and wellness
Number of staff: 4
Funding to date: Bootstrapped
if you go
The flights
Emirates flies to Delhi with fares starting from around Dh760 return, while Etihad fares cost about Dh783 return. From Delhi, there are connecting flights to Lucknow.
Where to stay
It is advisable to stay in Lucknow and make a day trip to Kannauj. A stay at the Lebua Lucknow hotel, a traditional Lucknowi mansion, is recommended. Prices start from Dh300 per night (excluding taxes).
Top tips to avoid cyber fraud
Microsoft’s ‘hacker-in-chief’ David Weston, creator of the tech company’s Windows Red Team, advises simple steps to help people avoid falling victim to cyber fraud:
1. Always get the latest operating system on your smartphone or desktop, as it will have the latest innovations. An outdated OS can erode away all investments made in securing your device or system.
2. After installing the latest OS version, keep it patched; this means repairing system vulnerabilities which are discovered after the infrastructure components are released in the market. The vast majority of attacks are based on out of date components – there are missing patches.
3. Multi-factor authentication is required. Move away from passwords as fast as possible, particularly for anything financial. Cybercriminals are targeting money through compromising the users’ identity – his username and password. So, get on the next level of security using fingertips or facial recognition.
4. Move your personal as well as professional data to the cloud, which has advanced threat detection mechanisms and analytics to spot any attempt. Even if you are hit by some ransomware, the chances of restoring the stolen data are higher because everything is backed up.
5. Make the right hardware selection and always refresh it. We are in a time where a number of security improvement processes are reliant on new processors and chip sets that come with embedded security features. Buy a new personal computer with a trusted computing module that has fingerprint or biometric cameras as additional measures of protection.
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Creator: Mike White
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Torque: 623Nm
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Price: From Dh330,800 (Elevation: Dh236,400; AT4: Dh286,800; Denali: Dh345,800)
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