British tech tycoon Mike Lynch is among the six people missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning.
The 56m (183ft) vessel was carrying 22 people - 10 crew and 12 passengers - including British, American and Canadian nationals. Emergency services rescued 15 people, including a one-year-old British girl. Local media reported the yacht, sailing under the name Bayesian, sank after encountering a heavy storm overnight that caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air, to appear over the sea.
Mr Lynch, known by some as “the British Bill Gates”, co-founded software company Autonomy, which was later bought by tech giant Hewlett-Packard for $11bn (£8.6bn).
Truly life being stranger than fiction, in that he was recently in the news after being acquitted in the US.
He had this to say on the American legal system at the time: “the reason I’m sitting here, let’s be honest, is not only because I was innocent… but because I had enough money not to be swept away by a process that’s set up to sweep you away”.