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Italian firefighters found the body of the daughter of British tech tycoon Mike Lynch at midday on Friday, the last person missing from the yacht sinking in Sicily on Monday, which left seven people dead in total, including the billionaire. After the discovery of the first body on Monday, that of the ship’s cook, three men and three women were missing following the sinking of the “Bayesian” at dawn on Monday off Porticello, near Palermo. The body of Mike Lynch, 59, was recovered on Thursday.
The wealthy businessman, nicknamed the “British Bill Gates,” was celebrating with friends, colleagues and lawyers his acquittal in June in a fraud trial in the United States that could have cost him years in prison. His daughter Hannah, 18, a staunch feminist according to her friends, had just passed her final exams and had won a place to study English literature at Oxford University, British media reported.
The victims include Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International – a branch of the US bank – and insurer Hiscox, and his wife Judy, and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer who defended Mike Lynch in his US trial, and his wife Neda.
Costly recovery
Clifford Chance, where Morvillo worked, paid tribute Friday to the lawyer and his wife, saying everyone was “heartbroken by this tragic loss.” Bloomer and his wife Judy “were incredible people and an inspiration to many,” their family said in a statement Thursday. “Together for five decades, our only comfort is that they are still together today.”
The 56-metre luxury super yacht sank in just minutes at dawn Monday after a sudden tornado struck. Fifteen people were rescued, including six passengers. The speed at which the yacht sank and the fact that other boats around it were not hit raise questions, including whether the ballasted keel, which counterbalances the imposing mast, was lowered or raised at the time of the storm.
The head of the Italian Sea Group, which owns the Perini Navi shipyard that built the Bayesian, blamed human error. “Everything that happened reveals a long series of errors. The passengers should not have been in the cabins, the ship should not have been at anchor” in the weather conditions, Giovanni Costantino said in an interview Thursday with Corriere della Sera. The Bayesian, owned by his Lynch family, had a 75-metre mast, the tallest aluminium sail mast in the world, according to the Charter World website.
The delicate and complex operation to bring it back to the surface would probably cost around 15 million euros and take “six to eight weeks”, according to the official who led the operation to recover the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which sank off the coast of Italy in 2012.
To recover the yacht, the mast could be dismantled on the seabed and the boat would then be lifted whole using a giant crane and a team of 40 specialist divers, South African Nick Sloane told the daily. The Republic.
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