Bodies of tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and missing daughter now both recovered from stricken yacht

Dr Lynch's wife Angela Bacares, who is thought to have made it up on deck after the storm hit the boat was among 15 passengers and crew to survive.

When the tornado struck, the yacht was believed to have been anchored to the sea floor and the boat fatally listed – trapping Dr Lynch, his daughter and four others in cabins which became blocked by flying debris and furniture.

It was only 76 days earlier that Dr Lynch and his co-defendant Steve Chamberlain – former VP of Finance at Autonomy – had been cleared of 15 fraud charges by a court in San Francisco.

The case stemmed from allegations made by US tech company Hewlett Packard resulting from its $11.7 billion acquisition of Cambridge-based Autonomy 13 years ago. It claimed Lynch and Chamberlain were party to inflating Autonomy’s value ahead of the acquisition. The Cambridge executives were extradited to the US under papers signed by the then Home Secretary Priti Patel.

The former Autonomy executives had feared that they could each have faced 20 years or more in jail had the fraud charges stuck. Dr Lynch fretted that, suffering from various minor conditions as he did, he might even die inside.

Then on Monday a freakish double tragedy struck in different parts of Europe: Chamberlain was declared dead having been hit by a car while jogging in Cambridgeshire last Saturday and being put on life support.

Just hours earlier at that fateful Monday dawn his former Autonomy boss was declared missing at sea after the Bayesian sank. It now seems certain that the former work colleagues and co-defendants died on the same day.

The sailing party was reportedly devised as a celebration of the US court victory for Dr Lynch’s family and professionals who had worked on his case.

Dr Lynch, a former adviser on AI and general Science & Technology to then Prime Minister David Cameron, never waivered from protesting his and Steve Chamberlain’s innocence. And he insisted that it was only his wealth that allowed him to fight for freedom and saved him from jail.

In one of our last exchanges he vowed to initiate a campaign to ensure that no UK executive would ever again be extradited to the US and forced to go through such an ordeal if a buying business failed to obey the normal ‘caveat emptor’ rules of engagement.

• Large numbers of tributes to Dr Lynch from company execs, friends and associates, have been received and extracts will be published in the August 29 print issue of Business Weekly. We wish to send our sincere condolences to both the Lynch and Chamberlain families at this tragic time.