Luxury Yacht of "Britain's Bill Gates" Salvaged After 10 Months... Will the Cause of the Accident Be Revealed?

Celebration of Acquittal Turns into a "Voyage of Death"
Full-Scale Investigation into the Cause of the Accident to Begin Soon

As the salvage operation for the luxury yacht Beigean, which sank off the coast of Sicily, Italy last summer, has been completed, attention is now focused on whether clues to the cause of the accident that claimed the lives of seven people?including Autonomy founder Mike Lynch, often referred to as the "Bill Gates of Britain," and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah?will be uncovered. On the 22nd (local time), the Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported that the Beigean, which was raised to the surface the previous day, had been moved to the port of Termini Imerese in Palermo, northern Sicily.

The Beigean, owned by Lynch's wife’s company, sank while anchored about 700 meters off the coast of Porticello Harbor in Palermo, Sicily, in the early hours of August 19 last year. Photo by AFP·Yonhap News

Previously, the Beigean, owned by Lynch's wife's company, sank while anchored about 700 meters off Porticello Harbor in Palermo, Sicily, in the early hours of August 19 last year. Of the 22 people on board (12 passengers and 10 crew members), only 15?including Lynch's wife and their one-year-old baby?were rescued. The passengers had gathered to celebrate Lynch's acquittal from fraud charges related to allegedly inflating Autonomy's value when it was sold to Hewlett-Packard (HP) for $11 billion (about 14.7 trillion won) in 2011. To commemorate the not-guilty verdict, Lynch invited those who had stood by him in court to a luxury yacht trip, which tragically turned into a "voyage of death." The Beigean was originally scheduled to be salvaged last month, but the operation was completely halted after a diver died during underwater work on May 9.

Afterward, Italian authorities reviewed safety protocols and revised the plan to use unmanned submersible equipment, resulting in a delay of about a month in the salvage operation. The Beigean, measuring 56 meters in length, is believed to have capsized and sunk within just 15 seconds after being hit by winds exceeding 130 kilometers per hour at the time of the accident. However, Italian investigators are not ruling out the possibility of human error and are continuing their investigation. Authorities note that other vessels in the vicinity remained afloat despite the severe storm, leaving multiple possibilities open. There is also keen interest in the contents of a hard disk drive reportedly stored in a waterproof safe inside the yacht.

According to CNN in the United States, there is a possibility that this hard disk drive contains "sensitive" information that could be of interest to foreign governments such as Russia and China. Lynch, a giant in the British information technology (IT) industry, maintained relationships with intelligence agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom through several companies he founded, including the cybersecurity firm Darktrace. Survivors of the accident testified that Lynch, who "did not trust cloud services," would always bring data storage devices aboard the yacht for each voyage. Meanwhile, once the yacht is mounted on a special support frame, a full-scale investigation into the cause of the accident is expected to begin.