Billionaire’s widow sued for $790 million after superyacht tragedy

The builder of Mike Lynch’s doomed Bayesian superyacht has sued his widow claiming its sales collapsed following the tragedy.

The Italian Sea Group (TISG) has filed a €456 million ($790 million) claim in a court in Sicily, alleging that the crew and the superyacht’s holding company were responsible for its sinking.

The claim, seen by The Telegraph, says the superyacht maker has lost hundreds of millions of euros in sales as a consequence of being blamed for the tragedy.

Lynch, the former Autonomy chief executive, was one of Britain’s best-known technology entrepreneurs. He died alongside his teenage daughter Hannah and five other victims when the boat capsized during a freak storm in August 2024.

Angela Bacares Lynch, the tycoon’s wife, who survived the sinking, is the legal owner of Revtom, the Isle of Man-registered entity that owned the £30 million ($59.5 million) superyacht.

TISG – which is majority-owned by Giovanni Costantino, the Italian yachting millionaire – claims the crew’s incompetence and negligence led the boat to capsize and sink during a storm off the Sicilian coast.

Bacares Lynch declined to comment.

A source close to the Lynch family said: “This claim is as cynical as it is predictable. The UK investigation has raised serious, unresolved questions about the yacht’s design, stability and operating characteristics, including vulnerabilities unknown to the owner and crew.

“This action appears designed to distract from those issues but it will not prevent proper scrutiny of how the vessel was designed, approved and built. It is desperate, opportunistic and in bad faith.”

The lawsuit states that the Bayesian was “unsinkable” but that its crew failed to shut hatches, heed weather warnings and lower the vessel’s keel, leading it to capsize during strong winds.

It contrasts with a report by the UK Marine Accident Investigation Branch, which last year found that the superyacht – which had one of the world’s tallest masts – had “vulnerabilities” that the crew was unaware of.

TISG and Costantino’s GC Holding Company have filed their claim in a court in Termini Imerese, near to where the yacht sank. It is against Revtom as well as James Cutfield, the boat’s captain, and Timothy Eaton and Matthew Griffiths, two crew members.

It claims the captain and crew “committed an incredible and unspeakable series of very serious errors and omissions” that meant the Bayesian failed to right itself under heavy winds. It says that Revtom is also liable for the actions of the crew.

TISG said it had suffered a “ruinous” loss of revenue and profits, a slump in its share price and a collapse in the value of Perini Navi, the shipbuilding brand that constructed the Bayesian in 2008.

The company bought Perini out of bankruptcy in 2021 and had plans to sell almost €1 billion worth of yachts by 2028. Instead, sales of Perini yachts had fallen to zero since the accident, it said.

“Not only has TISG been unable to sell a single Perini-branded yacht, seeing the ship owners involved in ongoing negotiations vanish, but it has also stopped receiving a single expression of interest from the group of international brokers with whom it collaborates,” the company said.

TISG did not respond to a request for comment. Cutfield, Eaton and Griffiths could not be reached for comment. Italian prosecutors have said crew members are under criminal investigation.

Lynch founded the Cambridge software company Autonomy before selling it to Hewlett Packard (HP) for £7 billion in 2011.

US prosecutors charged him with fraud but he beat the charges in 2024. He was celebrating his freedom on his yacht with family and friends when he died.

His estate is now facing potential bankruptcy as a result of a separate UK legal action from HP, which is seeking £1.5 billion in damages.

TISG last year sued The New York Times after an investigation by the US newspaper raised questions over the Bayesian’s design.

Telegraph, London

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