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Violent storm struck in the early hours of Monday

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One man confirmed dead, six people missing

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Tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch among the missing

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Morgan Stanley International chairman is also missing

(Updates with requests for comment from Morgan Stanley ( MS ) and

Clifford Chance in paragraph 6)

By Rosaura Bonfardino and Igor Petyx

PALERMO, Sicily, Aug 19 (Reuters) - One man died and six

people were missing, including British tech entrepreneur Mike

Lynch and his daughter, after a luxury yacht was struck by an

unexpectedly violent storm and sank off Sicily early on Monday.

The British-flagged "Bayesian", a 56-metre-long (184-ft)

sailboat, was carrying 22 people and was anchored just off shore

near the port of Porticello when it was hit by ferocious

weather, the Italian coast guard said in a statement.

Eyewitnesses said the yacht vanished quickly beneath the

waves shortly before dawn. Fifteen people escaped before it went

down, including Lynch's wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the

boat, and a one-year-old girl.

The names of the dead and missing were not immediately

released, but a person familiar with the rescue operation

confirmed that Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were

not accounted for.

Salvatore Cocina, head of the Civil Protection in Sicily

said Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International

and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance were also

among the missing people.

Italian media said the dead man was the yacht's onboard

chef.

Morgan Stanley ( MS ) did not immediately respond to a phone call

and email seeking comment after hours. Clifford Chance did not

return a request for comment.

The Italian coast guard said the missing had British,

American and Canadian nationalities. Survivors said the trip had

been organised by Lynch for his work colleagues.

"The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not

of this magnitude," a coast guard official in the Sicilian

capital Palermo told Reuters.

The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters that when the

winds surged, he had turned on the engine to keep control of his

vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian, which had been

anchored alongside him.

"We managed to keep the ship in position and after the storm

was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone," Karsten

Borner told journalists. The other boat "went flat on the water,

and then down," he added.

He said his crew then found some of the survivors on a life

raft - including a baby girl and her mother - and took them on

board before the coast guard picked them up.

Lynch, aged 59, is one of Britain's best-known tech

entrepreneurs. He built the country's largest software firm,

Autonomy, from his ground-breaking research at Cambridge

University, and became known as Britain's Bill Gates.

He sold the firm to HP for $11 billion in 2011, before the

deal unravelled spectacularly following the acquisition, with

the U.S. tech giant accusing him of fraud.

Once lauded by academics, scientists and politicians,

Lynch spent much of the last decade in court defending his

name. He was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June, after

he spent more than a year living effectively under house arrest.

He said at the time that he was "elated" to be cleared in

the criminal trial in which he denied any wrongdoing and blamed

HP for botching the integration of the two companies.

DIVERS INSPECT WRECK

The coast guard said divers were inspecting the wreck of the

Bayesian, which was lying at a depth of 49 metres.

Prosecutors in the nearby town of Termini Imerese have

opened an investigation to look into what had gone wrong.

Storms and heavy rainfall have swept down Italy in

recent days after weeks of scorching heat, which had lifted the

temperature of the Mediterranean sea to record levels, raising

the risk of extreme weather conditions, experts said.

"The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30

degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), which is almost 3 degrees more

than normal. This creates an enormous source of energy that

contributes to these storms," said meteorologist Luca Mercalli.

"We can't say that this is all due to global warming but

we can say that it has an amplifying effect," he told Reuters.

The Bayesian was built by Italian shipbuilder Perini in

2008 and was last refitted in 2020. Its 75-metre mast is the

tallest aluminium mast in the world, Perini said on its website.

The shipspotting.com website said the boat was owned by a

firm called Revtom Limited. Lynch's wife Bacares is named as the

sole shareholder of the firm on company documents.

The yacht's name would resonate with Lynch because his

PhD thesis and the software that made his fortune was based on

Bayesian theory.

The ship won a string of awards for its design and can

accommodate up to 12 guests in six suites and a crew of 10,

according to online specialist yacht sites.

The boat left the Sicilian port of Milazzo on Aug. 14 and

was last tracked east of Palermo on Sunday evening, with a

navigation status of "at anchor", according to vessel tracking

app Vesselfinder.

(Writing by Crispian Balmer and Giulia Segreti; Additional

reporting by Danilo Arnone in Porticello, Marta Di Donfrancesco,

Gavin Jones and Alvise Armellini in Rome, Paul Sandle and Sachin

Ravikumar in London, Wladimiro Pantaleone, David Bario and

Lananh Nguyen in New York; Editing by Angus MacSwan, Ros Russell

and Michael Perry)