Yacht sinks in Sicily: Morgan Stanley International CEO Jonathan Plummer among those missing | Italy

Morgan Stanley International Inc Chairman Jonathan Plummer is among those missing after the yacht carrying British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm, an Italian official said.

Salvatore Cocina, head of Sicily’s civil protection agency, said Bloomer and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer with Clifford Chance, were among the six people missing. Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, had not been found by late Monday.

The update comes as Lynch’s co-defendant in a US trial over the sale of his software company to Hewlett-Packard has reportedly died after being hit by a car in England.

The British-flagged 56-metre sailing ship “Baiziane” was carrying 22 people and was anchored off the coast near the port of Porticello when it was hit by a hurricane in the early hours of Monday morning, the Italian coast guard said in an earlier statement.

Authorities confirmed the death of a man believed to be the ship’s chief cook. The Coast Guard said the missing were British, American and Canadian nationals.

Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Pakaris, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old girl rescued by her mother.

A spokesman for Lynch, the co-founder of Autonomy, a software company that has become one of the UK’s most prominent tech companies, declined to comment. The survivors said the trip was organised by Lynch for his co-workers.

Lynch, once described as the British Bill Gates, has spent much of the past decade in court defending his name against fraud charges related to the $11 billion sale of his software company, Autonomy, to US technology company Hewlett-Packard.

The 59-year-old was acquitted by a San Francisco jury in June, after spending more than a year living under virtual house arrest.

Hours after news of the boat sinking broke, it emerged that another defendant in the trial, Stephen Chamberlain, had died after being hit by a car while jogging in Cambridgeshire.

Chamberlain, a former vice president of finance at Autonomy, was in an accident on Saturday morning and was placed on life support, Reuters reported. Chamberlain’s attorney, Gary Linsenberg, said in a statement that he died after being “fatally struck by a vehicle” while jogging.

Earlier today, rescue divers tried to reach the hull of the ship “Baizian”, which was carrying a crew of 10 people and 12 passengers, according to the Italian Coast Guard.

The boat sank to a depth of about 49 metres, and the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Termini Imerese is investigating the incident.

“The wind was very strong. The weather was expected to be bad but not this bad,” a coast guard official in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, told Reuters.

A nearby boat captain told Reuters that when the winds picked up, he turned on the engine to control his vessel and avoid colliding with the Bayzian, which was anchored next to him.

“We managed to keep the ship in place and after the storm was over we noticed that the ship behind us had disappeared,” Carsten Borner told reporters, adding that the other boat “turned over and sank.”

He added that his crew then found some survivors on a lifeboat – including an infant girl and her mother – and took them aboard before the coast guard picked them up.

Eight of those rescued, including a one-year-old child, were taken to hospitals and were all in stable condition.

“The baby is fine. The mother is also doing well, albeit with some minor scratches. The father will be discharged soon,” said Domenico Cipolla, chief doctor at the Di Cristina Hospital in Palermo, where the one-year-old girl and her mother were admitted.

“They said most of them were colleagues who worked with Lynch. They are in deep shock. As time goes on, they are increasingly aware that they lost many friends this morning.”

The New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that two New Zealand citizens were on board the yacht.

New Zealand lawyer Ayla Ronald has been named as one of the survivors. Her father, Lyn Ronald, confirmed to the Guardian that his daughter was fine but traumatised by the incident.

Ronald works for international law firm Clifford Chance and was working in London on the long-running fraud case in which Lynch was accused, her father said.

Storms and heavy rain have swept across Italy in recent days after weeks of scorching heat that has pushed Mediterranean temperatures to record levels, increasing the risk of extreme weather, experts say.

“The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), which is about 3 degrees above normal. This creates a huge source of energy that contributes to these storms,” ​​said meteorologist Luca Mercalli.

“We can’t say it’s all due to global warming but we can say it has an amplifying effect,” he told Reuters.