This photograph shows a Coast Guard boat with Italian fireboats and an Italian fire brigade helicopter search for six missing passengers after recovering a victim due to a sailboat sank off the coast of Porticello, nosthwestern of Sicily Island, on August 19, 2024.
Alessandro Fucarini | Afp | Getty Images
The chairman of Morgan Stanley International, Jonathan Bloomer, is among those missing after a luxury yacht sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily on Monday, according to media reports.
Sicily’s civil protection agency told the BBC that Bloomer and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo were among the six people still missing.
CNBC has contacted Morgan Stanley and Italian officials for comment. Clifford Chance declined to comment.
According to his LinkedIn page, Bloomer is also the chair of insurance firm Hiscox.
British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were also missing as search and rescue efforts resumed on Tuesday.
The 56-metre sailing boat “Bayesian” was hit by a violent storm around 4 a.m. local time on Monday, as it carried 10 crew members and 12 passengers on board. The anchored vessel capsized near the port of Porticello around an hour later, with witnesses telling local media that the vessel descended rapidly after its mask broke.
One person, the ship’s cook Ricardo Thomas, was confirmed by the Italian coastguard to have died. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was among the 15 people who were rescued.
Italian news outlet La Repubblica interviewed a woman named in media reports as Charlotte Golunski, who said she had briefly lost her one-year-old in the sea before holding the infant above the stormy waves in the dark. She was eventually rescued, along with the child’s father.
Those on board are thought to have been employees and associates of Lynch, the 59-year-old founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy.
Lynch was embroiled in a protracted legal battle with Hewlett Packard after the U.S. tech giant accused him of inflating Autonomy’s value in an $11 billion sale.
He was extradited from Britain to the U.S. last year to stand trial over the HP allegations. In June, Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges after a three-month trial.
— CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this story.