Of the 12 guests and 10 crew members on board, one person is dead and six others – including Lynch – are missing, the Associated Press reported.

Jonathan Bloomer, chief executive of Morgan Stanley International, is also among the missing, the Times reported, citing Italian authorities. Bloomer is a longtime friend of Lynch and testified in Lynch’s favor in his U.S. fraud trial earlier this year.

Lynch’s daughter Hannah, presumably 18 years old, is also among those missing in the accident, the BBC reported, citing the general director of the Sicilian civil protection service, Salvatore Cocina.

Lynch’s lawyer Christopher Morvillo and Morvillo’s wife are also among the missing, a colleague of Morvillo told Business Insider.

Gary Lincenberg, a lawyer who represented Lynch’s co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain in the high-profile fraud trial in which both men were acquitted, said Morvillo and his wife were “presumed deceased” after the yacht sank near Sicily.

Lincenberg said he learned the news about Morvillo shortly after learning that Chamberlain was killed in a one-car crash while jogging on Saturday.

“After 48 hours, I still can’t comprehend what happened, but both of our clients, as well as Chris and his wife, are dead,” Lincenberg told Business Insider.

Authorities have not confirmed whether the missing people have died.

The remaining 15 people on board, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares, were rescued, the BBC reported.

Another rescued passenger, Charlotte Emsley, described how she kept her one-year-old child alive by keeping her head above water.

“I held her above water with all my strength and stretched my arms up to prevent her from drowning,” she told reporters from Italian news channel La Repubblica, according to a BBC translation.

“It was completely dark. I couldn’t keep my eyes open in the water. I screamed for help, but all I could hear around me were the screams of others,” Emsley told the outlet.

Divers saw “corpses through the portholes” of the wreck during rescue efforts, said Salvo Cocina, head of Sicily’s civil protection agency, Sky News reported.

Divers found the body of a man at a depth of 50 meters. Local media suspected that it was the ship’s chef. Business Insider could not confirm the claims.

The superyacht is registered on the Isle of Man.

According to Reuters, the captain of a nearby boat and the owner of the Bayesian are also among the missing.

A local fire department told CNBC News that “divers, a motorboat and a helicopter” were assisting in the search.

But Italian authorities are baffled that they have not yet found the missing passengers.

“We have been searching all day with helicopters and boats and have found nothing. There is no point in doing so, in these conditions we should have found something by now,” Francesco Venuto, a spokesman for the Sicilian civil protection agency, told Sky News, adding that they “must be there (with the boat).”

Lynch, the founder of British software company Autonomy, was acquitted of billions of dollars in fraud charges by a jury in San Francisco in June.

Last year, he was extradited to the United States for the first time. He was accused of artificially inflating the value of Autonomy in order to defraud Hewlett Packard, which was bought for $11 billion in 2011.

In November 2012, HP announced a write-down of $8.8 billion in connection with the acquisition of Autonomy. $5 billion of this was due to “accounting irregularities” that led to HP massively overpaying for Autonomy.

Lynch, a former adviser to the British government, has always maintained his innocence. His lawyers called the charges a “judicial farce” that “has no place in a US court.”

Bloomer, who is also among the missing, chaired Autonomy’s audit committee and gave key testimony in Lynch’s favor during the trial, telling the court that Lynch was not significantly involved in the company’s accounting.

In an interview after his acquittal, published late last month, Lynch told the Times he was looking forward to his chance at a second life after fearing he would die in prison if convicted.

“I had to say goodbye to everything and everyone because I didn’t know if I was ever going to come back,” Lynch told the outlet. “If that had gone the wrong way, that would have been the end of life as I know it in every way.”

Lynch also told the Times that his acquittal had made him more spiritual and caused him to reflect on what he called “Peter issues.”

“So you get to the gates of heaven before you’re sent to the elevator to the basement, and you say to Saint Peter, ‘You know, right before I leave, what was that about? What was that?'” Lynch told the outlet.

The technology magnate, who faces a prison sentence of more than 20 years if convicted, had been preparing to set up a campaign to help wrongly accused Britons in the US, according to The Telegraph.

Representatives for Mike Lynch did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.

August 19, 2024 – Update: This story has been updated to include news that Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer is among the missing.