The chef, whose body was found outside the vessel, died by drowning, the coroner said. Toxicology reports on the dead have not yet been released, but none had suffered any physical injuries when the boat went down.
Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares and 14 others survived, including the captain James Cutfield, who, along with a deckhand and the yacht’s engine room manager, is
under investigation for multiple manslaughter and causing a negligent shipwreck. They have all been allowed to leave Italy.
Some of the 15 survivors, of whom nine were crew members and six were passengers, including a 1-year-old girl, reportedly told prosecutors that Lynch “did not trust cloud services” and always kept data drives in a secure compartment of the yacht wherever he sailed, a source with the prosecutor’s office told CNN. None of the crew or passengers who survived the incident were tested for drugs or alcohol because they were in a “state of shock,” authorities said during a news conference following the recovery of the bodies.
Morvillo represented Lynch when he was acquitted in a criminal fraud case in the US in June tied to the takeover by Hewlett Packard of his software company Autonomy, and survivors told investigators that the cruise was a celebration of that acquittal, according to the assistant prosecutor, Raffaele Cammarano. Though Lynch was acquitted of any criminal wrongdoing in the US, Hewlett Packard has indicated it will not drop its bid to
collect a $4 billion civil payout from Lynch’s estate, awarded by a British court in 2022.
In what appears to be a tragic coincidence, Lynch’s business partner Stephen Chamberlain — who was his co-defendant in the US fraud case and the former chief operating officer of Darktrace — died on August 19, the same day the Bayesian sank, after being hit by a car while out jogging two days earlier. A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office told CNN that Cutfield told them Lynch had learned of Chamberlain’s serious condition and had planned to cut the cruise short to return to the UK to see his business partner, who had been on life support.
The Bayesian sank a few hours before Chamberlain died in the hospital, his lawyer said. Lynch would not have known of his partner’s death, and Chamberlain was in a coma so would not have known about the shipwreck, Chamberlain’s legal counsel said.