This is stranger than fiction.
Bad Timing
As billionaire Mike Lynch’s yacht sinking made headlines, the missing tycoon’s recent fraud trial co-defendant died in a UK hospital after being hit by a car.
As the BBC reports, the former vice president of finance at Lynch’s enterprise software firm Autonomy Stephen Chamberlain was declared dead on Monday after a car hit him when he was out on a run in Cambridgeshire, the county where England’s tony Cambridge University is located.
Earlier that very day, a yacht said to be owned by Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares called the Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily after being struck by a water-bound tornado. As Business Insider reports, the Autonomy founder, his 18-year-old daughter, his fraud trial attorney Christopher Morvillo, and the lawyer’s wife are now all missing and feared dead following the crash.
Bacares and several other people were rescued by a nearby vessel that, as ABC noted, did not suffer the same fate in the storm.
As Italian civil protection lead Salvo Cocina said during a media conference quoted by ABC, the Bayesian was “in the wrong place at the wrong time” — an apt analysis that seems to have applied to Chamberlain as well.
Twisted Fate
As the BBC and other outlets reported in the wake of his untimely death note, Chamberlain had along with Lynch been accused of 11 counts of fraud related to the sale of Autonomy to Hewlett Packard in 2011. Earlier this summer, the pair were acquitted on all those charges — only for tragedy to strike just a few months later.
Before either man met their more recent doom, they’d been considered incredibly lucky, as the Daily Beast reports, to have been acquitted at all.
Months prior to their own fraud trial, Lynch’s right-hand man, ex-Autonomy chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain, was convicted of similar charges and ended up being sanctioned in the United Kingdom. Until their acquittal, the still-missing billionaire was sure that if he met the same fate as Hussain, he’d end up dying in prison.
“I have various medical things that would have made it very difficult to survive,” Lynch told The Guardian last month, following the acquittal. “If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.”
With Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter now among the missing in the Bayesian sinking and Chamberlain dead, their acquittal earlier this summer has taken on a darker tone.
“In the course of 48 hours, I can’t process what has happened,” explained Lynch’s other attorney, Gary Lindberg, in an interview with BI, “but both of our clients, as well as Chris and his wife, are gone.”
More on maritime tragedy: Researchers Discover Legendary Shipwreck Using Underwater Imaging