In a haunting interview just a week before the Bayesian yacht tragedy, the American lawyer who worked tirelessly to get the “British Bill Gates” Mike Lynch acquitted of fraud charges spoke of devoting his career to the case.
Chris Morvillo, a former prosecutor and prominent attorney for Clifford Chance, spoke with attorney and podcast host David Markus in an interview published days before an unexpected storm hit Lynch’s yacht as they celebrated the acquittal.
Describing Lynch’s fraud case, Morvillo admitted that he had been “a constant presence in my life over the last 12 years.”
Morvillo also revealed the legal sleight of hand he employed to secure Lynch’s acquittal in the “complex” case, and how prosecutors made an apparent mistake that allowed him to use his decades of experience against her.
Chris Morvillo (left) spoke with attorney and podcast host David Markus just a week before his disappearance, where he delved into Mike Lynch’s fraud trail that he says was a major part of the rest of my life.
Morvillo was a prominent lawyer who won the acquittal of British billionaire Mike Lynch earlier this year, and was on Lynch’s yacht when it sank this week, leaving both of them and four others missing.
Following news of Morvillo’s disappearance in the yacht tragedy on Monday, Markus told DailyMail.com that he had “just met Chris and I am shocked and heartbroken by the news.”
“I know all of us in the criminal defense field are thinking of him and his family right now,” Markus said. “Chris was an amazing guy – smart, charming and likeable. This is all terrible and sad.”
California prosecutors accused Lynch of fraudulently inflating the value of his company, Autonomy, when it was sold to Hewlett-Packard.
In his interview with Markus, Morvillo revealed that he was initially surprised to find himself on the billionaire’s legal team, saying he was hired just minutes after consulting with his own firm about the possibility of taking a role in the fraud case after seeing it in the news cycle in 2012.
“I sent a note to the head of our litigation group in England saying, ‘I just saw this, is there anything we can do to help either party?’ just looking for an input,” Morvillo said.
“He replied to me about 15 minutes later telling us that we had just been hired.”
Morvillo said that after flying to London to meet with Lynch, the wide-ranging fraud case quickly took over his daily life at his law firm.
“I spent much of the rest of my life going back and forth between London and New York,” he continued. “That took up a third of my career.”
Morvillo’s daughters, Sophie and Sabrina, were due to join him in Italy.
Morvillo (pictured with his wife Neda in 2018, who also died in the yacht tragedy) said this month that Lynch’s trial had been “a constant presence in my life over the past 12 years”.
The palatial family home in Connecticut
Morvillo said the case against Lynch was particularly complicated, having wound through the U.S. legal system for more than a decade before the trial began earlier this year.
He said prosecutors essentially presented “two separate cases” against Lynch and her co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain.
“The evidence against Mr Chamberlain and Mike was virtually unrelated to each other,” he said. “Therefore, in effect, two separate trials were taking place.
“And that made it all just a confusing mass of evidence, and we were never really sure which defendant it was pointing to.”
While this made for a complex trial, Morvillo, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the broad nature of the case was what enabled him to secure Lynch’s acquittal.
“It gave us countless opportunities to say to witnesses and in front of the jury, ‘This had nothing to do with Mike Lynch, you never met Mike Lynch, you never talked to Mike Lynch,'” he recalled.
‘The first seven witnesses the government called… had never met or spoken to Mike.’
The legal stunt was one of the main ways Morvillo said he was able to secure Lynch’s freedom, resulting in the billionaire inviting his legal team, as well as his family, onto his doomed yacht in Sicily this week.
Mike Lynch’s massive superyacht Bayesian (pictured) capsized during a severe thunderstorm on Monday morning
This comes as Italian authorities said divers (pictured Wednesday) found the bodies of two missing passengers aboard the doomed superyacht.
This comes after Italian authorities revealed on Wednesday that they had found the bodies of two missing passengers aboard the sunken superyacht.
Diving teams made the tragic discovery two days after Mike Lynch’s Bayesian sank after being hit by a “black swan” storm on Monday morning.
The body of at least one person was brought ashore shortly before 3 p.m. local time, before being placed in an ambulance waiting at the port of Porticello.
The remains of the couple, whose names or gender have not yet been revealed, were found in the hull of the ship behind two mattresses, with one of them said to be a “large man”.
The six guests are Lynch and her 18-year-old daughter Hannah, Morgan Stanley boss Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, and Morvillo and his jewelry designer wife Neda.