It was the tragic news of the week. The horrific Palermo shipwreck of the fatal Bayesian, which sank in the early hours of last Monday morning just outside the port of Porticello, Palermo, has shocked the world, but it has a “tragic coincidence”

The luxury yacht on which British tycoon Mike Lynch had invited associates and friends to celebrate his recent acquittal on fraud charges was within minutes at the bottom of the sea when it was hit by sudden bad weather.

“The horrific sailboat accident shocked the world,” Politico wrote earlier in the week, but put the fatal car crash injury of British tycoon Mike Lynch’s partner Mike Lynch in the same frame two days earlier in the Palermo wreck off Sicily.

Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain were tried as co-defendants in a fraud trial over the $11 billion sale of software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard. After the sale of Autonomy in 2011, Lynch co-founded the cybersecurity company Darktrace, appointing Stephen Chamberlain as CFO. The Cambridge-based company fights cyberattacks using software that learns the behavioral patterns of every agent in an organization, thus detecting unusual activity.

So far there is nothing to suggest criminal activity in the two men’s respective accidents, which are being attributed to tragic coincidence, Politico pointed out. However, what appears to be a mere coincidence takes on a different dimension when one considers the two business partners’ ties to British and US intelligence agencies.

It will be recalled that an investigation into involuntary manslaughter has already been launched by the Italian authorities in connection with the tragic Palermo shipwreck. According to the Daily Mail, the Termini Imerese prosecutor’s office, headed by Abrogio Cartozio, is investigating why the luxury yacht Bayesian capsized near the port of Porticello shortly before 5am on Monday morning. Investigators are looking into the offences of “causing a shipwreck and multiple negligent homicide” against “unknown persons”, according to Italian media quoted by the British newspaper.

The coincidence

The “British Bill Gates” billionaire Mike Lynch’s connections to US and British intelligence agencies are mentioned by Politico. While the recent shipwreck off Palermo, Sicily, may have been something that shocked the world in itself, the case took on a special interest with the news that Lynch, a British-Irish technology mogul, is one of those missing.

And while there is no suggestion of foul play and climatologists are talking about bad weather leading up to the Bayesian wreck, the death of Mike Lynch’s business partner Stephen Chamberlain in a car crash further complicates the case, raising the question of whether there is more to the story than “mere coincidence”.

The members of the Darktrace company were former intelligence officers

Lynch founded Darktrace in partnership with former British intelligence officials in 2013, after selling the software company Autonomy in 2011. The company was set up to combat cyberattacks by using software that learns the patterns of behaviour of every agent in an organisation and detecting any unusual activity.

One of the co-founders was Stephen Haxter, a senior member of MI5’s cyber defence team, who became Darktrace’s chief executive. Then Haxter, according to Politico, hired 30-year veteran of the secret service GCHQ (the British government’s communications headquarters), Andrew France, as the company’s CEO – who later joined the board of directors. Lynch served on the board until 2018, when he resigned after being accused of fraud.

In addition, former MI5 chief Jonathan Evans also served on Darktrace’s board for a time, while Jim Penrose, a 17-year US National Security Agency veteran, was in charge of the company’s US-related business. Other former spies at the company included technology director Dave Palmer, who previously worked at MI5 and GCHQ, and security director John Richardson, who worked in cyber defence for the UK government.

Lynch’s links with intelligence agencies go back 28 years

Lynch’s connections to the intelligence sphere predate Darktrace. His first company Cambridge Neurodynamics, which specialized in computer fingerprint recognition, had contracts with British intelligence agencies, Politico reports.

Lynch spun Autonomy out of Neurodynamics in 1996. The company, which Chamberlain joined in 2005, used machine learning to analyze data from sources such as intercepted phone calls and emails.

Autonomy also won high-profile tenders from UK and US government agencies, including a contract to provide infrastructure to the US Office of Homeland Security to analyse intelligence in the context of the post-9/11 war on terror.

The company reportedly held other contracts with US government agencies such as the military, NASA and US intelligence agencies. GCHQ and MI6 are also believed to have been clients. Furthermore, Richard Pearl, a former Pentagon appointee, served as one of the company’s directors.

The fraud charges and the acquittal

Lynch had been in the headlines in recent months because of a high-profile fraud case. According to Sky News, on 15 June he was cleared by a US court of all charges relating to the sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011.

He was extradited to the US to stand trial in May last year and spent 13 months under house arrest in San Francisco as he awaited trial on 17 charges of conspiracy and fraud – later reduced to 15 – brought against him by the US Justice Department.

Lynch was accused by HP of artificially inflating the value of Autonomy, a business he founded and ran before it was acquired by the US technology company. He denied any wrongdoing. Stephen Chamberlain was also charged with the same offences. Chamberlain, was the former vice-president of finance at Autonomy. Before his trial in the US, he was also the former chief operating officer of Darktrace.

But was it a scam? Depending on which judicial system one trusts the most will get a different answer. Because the dual, UK and US, long-running court battle had a completely different outcome…

The trial lasted 12 weeks and Lynch was acquitted of all charges. One count of conspiracy and 14 counts of wire fraud. Many of his political supporters called it “a fantastic correction of a miscarriage of justice that we have been fighting for many years.” But the British-Irish businessman’s fate has dealt him another harrowing adventure, lurking off the coast of Palermo.