"Bayesian superyacht was ‘virtually unsinkable’, says shipbuilder"
Prosecutors in Termini Imerese, close to where vessel went down on Monday, have opened an investigation
Mike Lynch: The Probability Man
As each minute ticks by, the scale of the disaster surrounding the sinking of Mike Lynch’s superyacht, the Bayesian, becomes not only more tragic but also more bizarre.
According to the latest news from the Italian search authorities, another five bodies have been recovered from the hull of the capsized yacht which leaves one person – Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah – still unaccounted for. The bodies have now been identified as Lynch and four of his guests on the yacht which included Jonathan Bloomer, Morgan Stanley International chairman and his wife, Judy, as well as Christopher Morvillo, Lynch’s Clifford Chance attorney, and his wife Neda. They were all there with Lynch on the yacht celebrating his recent acquittal from fraud charges brought by the US courts which gave him – in his words, a “second life,” but also as thanks for their support during the trial.
As each minute passes, the probability of a freak storm – being called a “tornado waterspout” by the experts – off the coast of Sicily striking down a yacht the size and tonnage of the Bayesian, which was anchored, also becomes even more extraordinary.
But that’s not the only peculiar event to have occurred in this tragedy. Two days before the Bayesian sank, Stephen Chamberlain, Lynch’s co-defendant in the US fraud trial brought by Hewlett Packard against his company, Autonomy, was killed in a road accident in Cambridgeshire. (See police report below) Chamberlain also worked at another Lynch-backed company, Darktrace, the cyber security specialists, which was recently sold to a US private equity firm, and has strong links to the world of intelligence and espionage.
As one of Lynch’s closest friends and colleagues in Cambridge told me: “It’s truly unimaginable. The probability of all these events – Mike’s acquittal only three months ago, the storm capsizing the Bayesian and the killing of Chamberlain while out for his morning run on a sleepy road in Cambridgeshire is simply behind the realms of probability. That they both died within weeks of the trial ending is seriously odd. We are not saying these were hit jobs but the coincidence is weird to say the least. ”
And it is. As you can imagine, the likelihood of these triple events coming so close together are feeding a frenzy among not just Lynch’s Cambridge friends and colleagues but online too. Some have suggested that these may both have been revenge attacks – or hit jobs – because the US Justice Department is not used to losing massive cases like the Lynch trial brought by US computing giant, HP. Others suggest that Lynch and Chamberlain’s close working relationships with the cyber security world through his many companies such as Darktrace, meant they knew too much about things they should not have known.
As POLITICO has reported, Darktrace had close ties to the worlds of UK and US intelligence. Indeed, Lynch co-founded Darktrace in partnership with former UK intelligence officials in 2013. One of the co-founders was Stephen Huxter, a high-ranking figure in MI5’s cyber defense team, who became a managing director at Darktrace.
POLITICO goes on to report that Huxter hired 30-year GCHQ veteran, Andrew France, as the company’s chief executive — he later joined the company’s board. Lynch sat on the board until 2018, when he left after being charged with fraud. A former head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, also sat on Darktrace’s board, while Jim Penrose, a 17-year veteran of the US National Security Agency, formerly headed up the company’s American operations.
Other former spooks at the company included director of technology, Dave Palmer, who had worked at MI5 and GCHQ, and director of security, John Richardson, who worked on cyber defence for the UK government.
Let’s brush aside the conspiracy theorists for now. What is sure is that the death of Lynch, his daughter and his friends is a devastating loss to their families, to the City and to those in the tightly-knit Cambridge network.
Cambridge is where Lynch studied and made his name as a brilliant young mathematician, and indeed, his fortune. And as Jonathan Margolis, tech journalist and author, wrote in a moving piece for The Independent after hearing about his missing friend: “The ultimate irony, however, is that the Essex-born academic, technology business innovator and tycoon, prime ministerial adviser and general member of the great and good is also one of the world’s leading authorities on probability theory.”
It was at Cambridge that Lynch became fascinated by probability theory, studying Bayesian statistics based on the work of the 18th century mathematician, Thomas Bayes. And the name of his yacht – the Bayesian – shows just how obsessed Lynch was by the world of probability, leading to his own work with machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Such was his fascination that Lynch was even intent on showing that dogs are, in their own way, “Bayesian calculators”. As Margolis wrote, “Bayesian logic is kind of magical thinking in a way because it’s so much more subtle and complex than classical logic, adding that Lynch told him that: “What dogs do in their Bayesian way is use intuition – see data in a different way. But this is not magic, it’s science and it’s going to lead a few years from now to astonishing developments in AI”.
And it was Lynch’s interest in neural networks – or machine learning – that led him to create several companies while still studying for his PhD at Cambridge, first creating audio products for music synthesisers and computer fingerprint recognition. Then came Autonomy, specialising in analysing business data, which he turned into a multi-billion pound company which was eventually bought by Hewlett Packard.
With the fortune Lynch made from the sale, he set up Invoke Capital, a venture fund to invest in other Cambridge-based dynamic young companies such as cyber specialists, Darktrace, and the AI fraud detection engine, Featurespace.
But it’s the $11 billion takeover that proved his nemesis. HP turned on Lynch, claiming that he had overinflated the group’s revenue and suing him for billions in damages. The cross-Atlantic legal wrangle lasted 13 years, leading eventually to Lynch being extradited to the US over a year ago. Handcuffed and chained after being taken at dawn from his Suffolk home, he then spent a year locked up under house arrest in San Francicso, before going to trial earlier this year.
Lynch professed his innocence throughout, claiming that HP had been in a rush to agree the takeover and had failed to do its proper due diligence in the deal.
Less than three months ago the US jury acquitted Lynch, and his co-defendant, Chamberlain, on all 15 charges of fraud. Bloomer and Morvillo worked with him on the trial throughout, with Bloomer giving evidence as he had been on the Autonomy audit committee. The US litigator, Morvillo was his attorney, becoming a close friend.
In a moving interview with BBC Radio 4 after his acquittal, Lynch spoke about how grateful he was for being given a “second life”. If found guilty, he would have faced 25 years in jail.
But Lynch also spoke about how the prohibitive costs of fighting a trial in the US made it almost impossible for anyone to have a fair hearing. As he said in the interview, the only reason he was able to keep up his defence during the decade-long legal battle and then the year of being held hostage in the US was because he was wealthy.
What’s more, he said he wanted to campaign against Britain’s extradition arrangements with the US which are extraordinarily one-sided. Remember the case of the young man, Harry Dunn, killed by a US woman driver outside an American airbase? The UK authorities failed to extradite her. He wanted to change the law so that it was no longer so stacked in favour of the US – and to fight to protect those who do not have the money to do what he did.
More to the point, the UK authorities should never have allowed Lynch to be extradited. Two of Lynch’s closest friends, Lord Deben and Tory MP David Davis, have spoken publicly since the disaster saying they will continue to lobby the government to make changes to the extradition treaties so that they are not so one-sided. Changing the law would be a fitting legacy for Lynch, his family and friends who died with him.
Police are appealing for witnesses after a collision between a pedestrian a car on the A1123 Newmarket Road in Stretham.
The blue Vauxhall Corsa was travelling between Stretham and Wicken on the A1123 when the collision with the pedestrian happened at about 10.10am on Saturday (17 August).
The man, who was in his 50s and from Longstanton, was taken to hospital with serious injuries where he remains.
The driver of the car, a 49-year-old woman from Haddenham, remained at the scene and is assisting with enquiries.
Anyone with information or dashcam footage of the collision, or the moments before or after, should contact the force via 101 and ask to speak with Detective Constable Kevin Drury in the serious collision investigation unit (SCIU).
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