Michael Richard Lynch, one of Britain’s most well-known businessmen, has been declared dead aged 59 after a yachting accident on Monday.
Lynch and seven others, including his daughter, tragically drowned after their vessel encountered freak weather off the coast of Sicily, Italy.
His death marks a cruel end for a man who recently found a new lease on life.
Once known as the ‘British Bill Gates’, Lynch had spent more than a decade fighting to clear his name of fraud charges that threatened to leave him behind bars for the rest of his life.
He was controversially extradited to the US to face criminal charges over the $11 billion sale of his company Autonomy to Hewlett Packard in 2011.
Lynch co-founded Autonomy in 1996, which became a leading UK tech company known for software that extracted data from unstructured sources.
Despite the initial success, HP wrote down Autonomy's value by $8.8 billion a year after the acquisition, leading to prolonged legal battles.
Yet in the face of a trial by public and the full weight of the US judiciary system, Lynch was finally exonerated of all charges this July, paving the way for his return to the home soil where he was raised since 1965.
On his return, Lynch immediately launched a campaign against what he saw as a deeply unfair extradition treaty between the UK and the US.
Lynch planned to work with former Cabinet minister David Davis to push for changes to the treaty, which makes it easier for Brits to be extradited to the States than vice versa.
But he also saw fit to make up for lost time with family.
Lynch, together with his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, wife Neda and 19 others, boarded the luxury yacht ‘Bayesian’ sometime prior to this Monday, reportedly to celebrate his acquittal.
The celebration turned into a tragic disaster as freak weather caused the yacht to capsize, sending all passengers overboard.
His wife was thankfully pulled out of the water, alongside 14 others.
Personal friend and lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman called Lynch an “inspiring figure” in the tech community.
His achievements stretched beyond Autonomy.
In 2012, Lynch founded Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on European tech investments.
Through Invoke, Lynch backed cybersecurity company Darktrace, which went on to become a multibillion-pound British success story that recently entered the FTSE 100.
An alumnus of Christ’s College Cambridge, he was appointed an OBE in the 2006 New Year Honours.