[Source: Reuters]

One man died and six people were missing, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter, after a luxury yacht was struck by an unexpectedly violent storm and sank off Sicily early on Monday.

The British-flagged “Bayesian”, a 56-metre-long (184-ft) sailboat, was carrying 22 people and was anchored just off shore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by ferocious weather, the Italian coast guard said in a statement.

Eyewitnesses said the yacht vanished quickly beneath the waves shortly before dawn. Fifteen people escaped before it went down, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old girl.

The names of the dead and missing were not immediately released, but a person familiar with the rescue operation confirmed that Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were not accounted for.

Salvatore Cocina, head of the Civil Protection in Sicily said Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International (MS.N), opens new tab and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance were also among the missing people.

Italian media said the dead man was the yacht’s onboard chef.

The Italian coast guard said the missing had British, American and Canadian nationalities. Survivors said the trip had been organised by Lynch for his work colleagues.

“The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude,” a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters.

The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters that when the winds surged, he had turned on the engine to keep control of his vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian, which had been anchored alongside him.

“We managed to keep the ship in position and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone,” Karsten Borner told journalists. The other boat “went flat on the water, and then down,” he added.

He said his crew then found some of the survivors on a life raft – including a baby girl and her mother – and took them on board before the coast guard picked them up.

Lynch, aged 59, is one of Britain’s best-known tech entrepreneurs. He built the country’s largest software firm, Autonomy, from his ground-breaking research at Cambridge University, and became known as Britain’s Bill Gates.

He sold the firm to HP for $11 billion in 2011, before the deal unravelled spectacularly following the acquisition, with the U.S. tech giant accusing him of fraud.

Once lauded by academics, scientists and politicians, Lynch spent much of the last decade in court defending his name. He was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June, after he spent more than a year living effectively under house arrest.

He said at the time that he was “elated” to be cleared in the criminal trial in which he denied any wrongdoing and blamed HP for botching the integration of the two companies.