LONDON — British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch was found dead in the wreckage of his superyacht that sank off the coast of Sicily earlier this week. He was 59.

Just two months ago, Lynch won a landslide victory in a landmark US trial over allegations of Hewlett-Packard that he artificially inflated the value of his company Autonomy when he sold it to the US enterprise tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.

Fears for Lynch’s life were raised earlier this week when he was reported missing following the sinking of a yacht off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in the Italian province of Palermo. It was later confirmed that it belonged to his wife Angela Bacares.

Bacares was one of 15 people rescued after the yacht sank earlier this week.

The anchored vessel, a 56-metre (184-foot) sailing yacht named Bayesian, was hit by a violent storm early Monday morning.

Witnesses told local media that the boat, carrying ten crew members and twelve passengers, sank quickly after its mast broke.

Lynch’s body was recovered from the wreckage of the yacht on Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC on Thursday. His daughter Hannah remains missing, according to the source, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the situation. Sky News had previously reported the news.

Lynch was born to Irish parents in 1965 in Ilford, a city in East London, and grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex. His mother was a nurse and his father was a firefighter.

Lynch grew up in modest circumstances, but at the age of eleven he received a scholarship to attend Bancroft’s School, a private school in Woodford Green, east London.

From Bancroft’s he attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences with a focus on areas such as electronics, mathematics and biology.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch earned his PhD in signal processing and communications.

In the late 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd., a company that designed and manufactured audio products for the music industry.

A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition company called Cambridge Neurodynamics, whose clients included South Yorkshire Police.

However, his big breakthrough came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he founded together with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spin-off from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company developed into one of the largest British technology companies.

Autonomy’s software, which uses pattern recognition algorithms, was touted as a solution that could help employees extract meaning from unstructured data such as web pages, emails, videos, audio and text.

These pattern recognition techniques were based on so-called Bayesian inference, a method of statistical inference named after a theorem by the 18th-century statistician Thomas Bayes.

Lynch’s luxury yacht, the Bayesian, was named after this mathematical model.

After selling his company to HP, Lynch became known in the British media as “Britain’s Bill Gates” and is considered a rare example of a British businessman who successfully built and grew a globally significant technology company that sold its products in numerous markets around the world.

However, Lynch’s reputation suffered further after the deal with HP took a turn for the worse. In 2012, HP had to write down Autonomy’s value by $8.8 billion – just one year after the acquisition.

Lynch soon became the target of a lengthy legal battle with the US technology giant. HP sued Lynch for $5 billion in damages, alleging that Lynch had inflated Autonomy’s revenue by around $700 million.

Lynch, who had long denied the allegations, was extradited from the UK to the US in 2023 to stand trial on the HP allegations.

This happened despite pressure from Lynch’s supporters on the British government not to allow his extradition.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office had filed charges including wire fraud and conspiracy over an alleged plot to inflate Autonomy’s revenues beginning in 2009, in part to lure a buyer.

In June, however, Lynch won a surprise victory and was acquitted of fraud charges after a trial that lasted three months.

During the trial, Lynch testified in his own defense, denying any wrongdoing and telling jurors that HP botched the integration of Autonomy.

Prosecutors had alleged that Lynch and Autonomy’s now-deceased financial manager Stephen Chamberlain, who also died in a tragic car accident on Saturday, inflated Autonomy’s finances in various ways.

These included retroactive agreements, concealing the company’s loss-making business by reselling hardware, and intimidating or bribing people who raised concerns.

However, Lynch told jurors that at Autonomy he focused on technical matters, not finances.

Accounting and financial decisions were left to Autonomy’s then-chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, he said.

Hussain was convicted in the U.S. in 2018 of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud in connection with the HP deal. He was released from prison in January after serving a five-year sentence.

In addition to founding Autonomy, Lynch also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European technology startups. He founded Invoke in 2012.

He became a key voice in the UK technology industry, supporting major names such as cybersecurity company Dark trail and the legal tech company Luminance.

Publicly traded Darktrace had previously defended itself against similar allegations by US short seller Quintessential Capital Management of inflating its revenues and earlier this year agreed to a deal to be bought and taken private by US private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion in cash.

Lynch previously served on the board of the BBC and also served as an advisor to the British government on the Science and Technology Council.

In 2014 and 2015, he was on the Forbes list of billionaires with an estimated net worth of one billion dollars. However, due to legal costs in the dispute with HP, he disappeared from the list again in 2016.

Aside from his legal troubles, Lynch had several hobbies that kept him busy, including keeping and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.

“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn in a 2016 interview. “I have cows that went extinct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has kept since the Middle Ages, and none of them have any Apple product.”

Before his death, Lynch had reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk, a county in eastern England, to recover from his legal battle in the United States, local newspaper East Anglian Times reported.

Just weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch had told The Times newspaper that he feared he would die in prison if he was found guilty of the HP charges.

“If this had gone in the wrong direction, it would have been the end of my life as I know it in every way,” Lynch said in the interview with the Times.

“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life – the question is what you want to do with it,” he added.