Mike Lynch’s legacy is better than a fraud trial and a yacht tragedy, says MAGGIE PAGANO

What was supposed to be a victory vacation aboard Mike Lynch’s luxury yacht, to celebrate his recent acquittal in the US courts, is turning into a nightmare with every passing hour.

In addition to Lynch and her 18-year-old daughter, four of her most powerful guests in town are also still missing and presumed dead.

Aboard the Bayesian yacht with Lynch and his family – his wife Angela Bacares has been rescued – were Jonathan Bloomer, president of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife, and Christopher Morvillo, a lawyer for Clifford Chance, and his wife, Nada.

Both Bloomer and Morvillo were closely involved in the Lynch fraud case.

They were at Bayesian as a thank you for their help during his three-month trial after he was acquitted of fraud charges following US giant Hewlett Packard’s $11bn buyout of his FTSE 100-listed data analytics company Autonomy.

Bloomer, a former Hiscox chairman and Prudential boss, testified during the San Francisco trial because he had chaired Autonomy’s audit committee while Morvillo represented it.

But there is another peculiar twist of fate in this horror story that tests the realms of probability.

Just two days before the Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday, Stephen Chamberlain, a former vice-president of finance at Autonomy and a co-defendant in the fraud case, was hit by a car while jogging near his home in Cambridgeshire.

Chamberlain, who also worked at another Lynch-backed company, cybersecurity specialists Darktrace, was put on life support after the crash but died shortly afterwards in hospital.

As a colleague of Lynch and Chamberlain at Cambridge told me, the likelihood that these tragedies occurred so close together – and so soon after both were acquitted – is nothing short of extraordinary.

It’s no wonder, then, that the Silicon Fen community is abuzz with conspiracy theories. The coincidence is so eerie that they can’t be blamed. Some say it was murder or that the American secret service’s alphabet men were involved.

Conspiracies aside, the double tragedies have left the city reeling from the horror and sadness of all involved.

As you might also expect, the mood in Cambridge, where Lynch studied and founded so many tech companies, is sombre as the many colleagues he worked with and supported mourn the loss of a great friend, but also of his brilliance.

Questions are also being raised about what will happen to Invoke Capital, the $1 billion venture capital fund he set up after selling Autonomy to invest in fast-growing companies in the UK and across Europe. Invoke, which worked closely with Cambridge University, specialised in the field of artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.

Lynch’s ambition was to provide, along with funding, the right expertise to enable them to scale up into global businesses – often perceived as the weakness of so many young, dynamic UK companies that fail to make it to the big leagues.

It hasn’t fared too badly. Among Invoke’s most successful companies are Darktrace, which employs 1,500 people and is valued at around £1bn, and Luminance, an award-winning machine learning platform for the legal sector.

Another high-performing investment from Lynch is the pioneering AI fraud detection engine Featurespace, led by Martina King, which is doing very well helping companies track everything from money laundering to credit card theft.

Featurespace is a classic example of the kind of startup Lynch was so keen to spot, and which received initial support from Cambridge’s incredibly compact and intelligent network.

Founded in 2008 by David Excell, an Australian academic, and the late Bill Fitzgerald, a Cambridge professor and expert in Bayesian statistics (and Lynch’s mentor at Cambridge), its expertise lies in the analysis of adaptive behaviour.

It is a form of artificial intelligence that predicts human intent by analyzing online data, making it possible to crack down on fraudsters in any online scenario, from gambling to dishonest trading.

Lynch was a major investor. When I interviewed King a few years ago, it was natural to ask him what he thought about the allegations against Lynch.

All she said was, “That man is a genius.” Not a bad legacy.