Mike Lynch — known as Britain's Bill Gates — battled for nearly a decade to beat accusations he had built his tech fortune on a fraudulent deal, only to enjoy that freedom for just a few months before tragedy struck.
When Mr Lynch sold his company Autonomy to Hewlett Packard, the deal was worth $US11 billion ($16.4 billion) and rocketed him up the rich list. But it would also become the focus of some of the biggest legal battles in corporate history.
When he walked free of the criminal charges in June, Lynch told the Times: "It's bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?"
But all the money in the world cannot control the weather and on Sunday night his the Lynch family's luxury yacht was struck by a sudden storm, with reports a freak ocean phenomenon ultimately caused the shipwreck.
Mr Lynch and his daughter Hannah remain missing after The Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday, with 10 crew and 12 guests aboard.
Fifteen people managed to escape, and so far one man, the yacht's chef, has been confirmed dead.
Six others remain missing, with reports emerging those not accounted for include legal and banking executives.
Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer who represented Mr Lynch in his long-running US trial, are among the missing.
The wives of both men are also unaccounted-for, Sicily's civil protection agency head Salvo Cocina said.
Italian authorities are continuing to search the area where the 56-metre luxury boat went down.
[Map]Eyewitnesses said the yacht disappeared rapidly while anchored off Porticello, not far from the Sicilian capital of Palermo.
Bad weather had been expected, but according to Cocina, the yacht happened to be in "the wrong place at the wrong time" and was likely hit by something called a waterspout.
Freak weather takes down yacht
For weeks before the disaster, Italy had experienced scorching heat waves. The nation had issued red alerts across more than 20 cities that saw sweltering and dangerous conditions.
But forecasts promised relief was on the way.
By Sunday night, cooler air would arrive and temperatures would drop, but the forecasts also predicted that with the dramatic shift in weather patterns would come storm activity, and some of it would be severe.
Italy has a history of offshore tornadoes — or waterspouts.
"Tornadic waterspouts" are described by the US National Ocean Service as tornadoes that form over water or "move from land to water".
"They have the same characteristics as a land tornado. They are associated with severe thunderstorms and are often accompanied by high winds and seas, large hail and frequent dangerous lightning."
Early Monday morning, as the meteorological service predicted, a cooler air arrived, temperatures dropped and instability increased across the country.
The small fishing village of Porticito on Sicily's western seaboard was battered by a sudden and fierce storm, with what looked like waterspouts reported out to sea.
Witnesses said at about 5am Monday, a tornado-like cloud engulfed the British-flagged Bayesian.
By daybreak, skies were clear and the sea was calm.
But the Bayesian was 50 metres below the surface, with reports emerging that a waterspout struck precisely where the 56-metre yacht had been moored.
Italian climatologist Luca Mercalli told Reuters the episode could have been a waterspout or a downburst — a more frequent phenomenon that doesn't involve the rotation of the air.
"We don't know which it was because it all happened in the dark in the early hours of the morning, so we have no photographs," he said.
In Italy, waterspouts can involve winds of up to 200 kilometres per hour, while downbursts can produce gusts of around 150kph.
This image of a waterspout over the Mediterranean in 2018 shows the whirling column of water and mist.
Statistics show that downbursts are becoming more frequent around the country, which Mr Mercalli said may be connected to global warming.
"The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees Celsius, which is almost 3 degrees more than normal. This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms," Mr Mercalli said.
"So we can't say that this is all due to climate change, but we can say that it has an amplifying effect."
The final voyage of the Bayesian
Mr Lynch walked from a United States court in June after spending months in court successfully battling accusations he had cooked books to maximise the sale price of his tech firm Autonomy.
He was facing up to 25 years in jail, but when the charges were dismissed, he was able to go home to the the United Kingdom where he pondered his future.
Although he avoided a prison sentence, Mr Lynch still faced a potentially huge bill stemming from a civil cased in London that Hewlett Package mostly won in 2022.
But for now, it seemed, Mr Lynch was celebrating his freedom.
He invited members of his legal team and their families to cruise through a small group of islands near Sicily on the Bayesian, a vessel listed as an asset of his wife.
On August 14, they set sail from Milazzo, a port city in Sicily's north-east.
For six days, they worked their way through the nearby Aeolian Islands before swinging back down to Cefalù, about halfway along Sicily's north coast, according to one of the survivors, Charlotte Golunski — a partner at Mr Lynch's company.
They continued west and eventually anchored about 700 metres off Porticello, where the boat was believed to be hit by the waterspout.
"It was terrible. The boat was hit by really strong wind and shortly after, it went down," Ms Golunski told Italy's ANSA news service.
Did the yacht's 75-metre mast play a role?
The captain of a boat that had been had been anchored alongside the Bayesian was worried about colliding with the yacht when gusts intensified.
"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 said.
Mr Borner's crew then rescued some survivors who had managed to clamber into a life raft — including Ms Golunski and her one-year-old daughter.
Four British personnel from the UK's Marine Accident Investigation Branch have been deployed to investigate what happened to the Bayesian and the factors that led to it sink.
The yacht was built in 2008 by an Italian shipbuilder and when it was launched, its 75-metre mast was the world's tallest aluminium variety.
That record was only beaten when Jeff Bezos launched his yacht Koru.
But aluminium masts are heavier than carbon and now there are questions about how the mast height and make may have contributed to the sinking.
Captain Borner, who helped rescue the 15 people in the Bayesian life raft, reported seeing that the yacht "went flat on the water and then down".
ABC/Reuters
