como superyacht owner

The Captain of Mike Lynch’s Super Yacht Shipwreck in Sicily Is Under Investigation 

T he captain of a super yacht that underwent a shipwreck in Sicily last week killing seven people, including the owner of the yacht, British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, is now under investigation. 

James Cutfield, 51, is being investigated for manslaughter and shipwreck, according to reports by local Italian news outlets. Charges have not officially been filed against him for the accident involving the 184-foot luxury yacht, named the Bayesian. However, investigators decided to look into Cutfield after interrogating him for a second time in a week, Italian news agency Ansa reports . 

A total of 22 people were on board the luxury yacht when the incident occurred, 15 of whom were rescued after the deadly wreck Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah Lynch, along with ​​Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer, Jonathan’s wife Judith Bloomer, lawyer Christopher Morvillo, Christopher’s wife Neda Morvillo, and Recaldo Thomas, a chef on the Bayesian, were also killed. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, survived.

It took authorities days to locate the bodies of the deceased, but they confirmed that most of the dead were found in the same part of the ship, indicating they have been trapped, according to investigators.

Officers initially thought the shipwreck was caused by the ship being struck by a tornado. But Termini Imerese prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio said that investigations indicated that the accident occurred rather quickly after the yacht was impacted by a downburst, a powerful downdraft from a thunderstorm. Notably, however, a nearby sailboat was largely unharmed by the same downburst.

“For me, it is probable that offenses were committed, that it could be a case of manslaughter, but we can only establish that if you give us the time to investigate," Cartosio previously said. 

It’s unclear if other crew members are under investigation for the incident.

Lynch had been celebrating his acquittal from fraud charges with family and those who defended him during the trial when tragedy struck. 

More Must-Reads from TIME

• Breaking Down the 2024 Election Calendar
• How Nayib Bukele’s ‘Iron Fist’ Has Transformed El Salvador
• What if Ultra-Processed Foods Aren’t as Bad as You Think?
• How Ukraine Beat Russia in the Battle of the Black Sea
• Long COVID Looks Different in Kids
• How Project 2025 Would Jeopardize Americans’ Health
• What a $129 Frying Pan Says About America’s Eating Habits
• The 32 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024

Contact us at [email protected]

The global authority in superyachting

• NEWSLETTERS
• Yachts Home
• The Superyacht Directory
• Yacht Reports
• Brokerage News
• The largest yachts in the world
• The Register
• Yacht Advice
• Yacht Design
• 12m to 24m yachts
• Monaco Yacht Show
• Builder Directory
• Designer Directory
• Interior Design Directory
• Naval Architect Directory
• Yachts for sale home
• Motor yachts
• Sailing yachts
• Explorer yachts
• Classic yachts
• Sale Broker Directory
• Charter Home
• Yachts for Charter
• Charter Destinations
• Charter Broker Directory
• Destinations Home
• Mediterranean
• South Pacific
• Rest of the World
• Boat Life Home
• Owners' Experiences
• Conservation and Philanthropy
• Interiors Suppliers
• Owners' Club
• Captains' Club
• BOAT Showcase
• Boat Presents
• Events Home
• World Superyacht Awards
• Superyacht Design Festival
• Design and Innovation Awards
• Young Designer of the Year Award
• Artistry and Craft Awards
• Explorer Yachts Summit
• Ocean Talks
• The Ocean Awards
• BOAT Connect
• Between the bays
• Golf Invitational
• BOATPro Home
• Superyacht Insight
• Global Order Book
• Premium Content
• Product Features
• Testimonials
• Pricing Plan
• Tenders & Equipment

Serial owner Neville Crichton discusses his love of yachting

Neville Crichton started life on a dairy farm 20 miles south of Dunedin on New Zealand's South Island. We met on his 41 metre motor yacht  C omo, in Saint-Tropez's old harbour, which gives you some indication of just how far he has travelled.

It turned out to be quite a month for Crichton; receiving a  Legacy honour at the World Superyacht Awards , and being named in the Queen's Birthday Honours list as a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. I catch up with him between the two announcements, and despite recent rain it is a beautiful day. We have a fabulous seafood salad alfresco, surrounded by St Tropez's unmistakable pastel waterfront and an awful lot of boats.

There weren't many boats around on that dairy farm, though, and Crichton's connection to the sea only started at the age of 12, when the family moved to Whakatane on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island. The Crichton's didn't have much money, but living on a river mouth the young Neville quickly learned that he loved being out on the water.

His first boat was a jury-rigged dinghy, before he managed to get together £4, 10 shillings for an old P Class. This is the class that started out all the marquee names of New Zealand sailing, including Russell Coutts and Peter Blake; but Neville Crichton was never going to win anything in his four-quid-and-change boat.

Fortunately a neighbour saw his enthusiasm. He' had bought a brand-new P Class for his son that was going unloved and unused, and he offered Crichton the boat -an offer quickly taken up. The results followed and Crichton represented the Bay of Plenty in the Tanner and Tauranga Cups,a trophy with many famous names on it.

"I ended up with a very good boat for nothing, so I was very lucky," Crichton says.

It came to an end when he left school at 15 and there was no more money or time for sailing. However, Crichton was far from done with competition. He turned to the car business for work and racing cars made a lot more sense than boats. He started in hill climbs, before moving onto saloon car racing, getting his first big win in 1967 in his own Cortina, in a six hour endurance race.

It sounds extraordinary now, given Crichton's phenomenal success, but he struggled to get a foothold in the auto trade.

"My first job was selling tractors. I wanted to get into the car business, but couldn't get a job selling cars," he says. "The closest thing I got to it was selling tractors, and that led back into running a small dealership with cars, tractors and haybailers. That was in a rural area of the Upper Waikato."

It led into a business selling used luxury cars, which he eventually combined with racing saloon cars very successfully in the New Zealand Touring Car Championship. By 1975 he had done well enough to sell-up and take a year off to cruise the Pacific in a 16 metre Philip Rhodes, doing a loop of Fiji, Tahiti, Papua New Guinea and Nouméa in New Caledonia, before returning home.

The next boat followed soon after, but it was more of a financial instrument than a sailing boat. Coming to the end of his Pacific tour, he was offered a partnership in a struggling company in Hawaii, whose main business was importing Mazda cars. Crichton built two big steel motor-sailers in New Zealand as investments to move his money to Hawaii, and bought 51 per cent of the company. He turned it around over the next seven years, acquiring all the luxury brands, Ferrari, Audi, Rover, Triumph, Jaguar and Rolls-Royce,to add to Mazda.

"I did a little bit of sailing during that period and the odd sporting event with an RX7, but nothing serious at all," he says.

The 'nothing serious' included buying a 1973 13.7 metre Sparkman & Stephens boat called Incathat he raced out of Hawaii and on the West Coast circuit. In 1979 he did the Transpac aboard a Farr Two Tonner that he bought for the purpose. Then he built a new 13.75 metre Laurie Davidson, the first of the Shockwaves, which he raced in 1980 and 1981 -and all despite the intervention of a near-fatal illness in 1977.

Brush with death

"The illness is 'what triggered me going back to New Zealand," Crichton says. "The prognosis wasn't very good, in fact it was terrible they gave me three months to live. I cashed up in Hawaii, shifted back and I'm still here. Otherwise I'd have been there today probably, it would have been a different life. 'I sold everything up and we shifted back to New Zealand, thinking it was the end of the road, but we beat it."

He underwent 30 operations in five years and lost his voice box, but it barely slowed him down.

"I never got sick, I just had cancer; I stopped breathing but I never got sick. I've never been sick in my life," Crichton declares. "I never let it get at me until I couldn't talk and then that was a major problem, because I'm a dealer and without talking you can't deal. 'If I hadn't conquered a method of talking I'm not quite sure whether I would have wanted to stick around too long."

"I read about these doctors in Indianapolis," he explains, "who had developed this method of talking, but didn't have a guinea pig to prove it. I went over there and worked with them - we really got the valve working and I was able to talk again."

Crichton was kicked in the throat playing rugby when he was younger, and had to be ventilated via a tube down the throat. It was damage from this procedure that he has been offered as an explanation for the disease.

"Throat cancer is really related to cigarette smoking and I've never smoked a cigarette in my life probably done every other bad thing, but never had a cigarette," he finishes with a smile.

Championships winner

By 1982 he had relocated back to New Zealand, and the pace really picked up. He campaigned his next  Shockwave,  a 13.4 metre German Frers, for the 1983 Two Ton Cup, and then in the New Zealand Admiral's Cup team, after a contentious time at the Australian trials.

He was also driving for BMW, winning virtually every long-distance race over three years in New Zealand, before joining Tom Walkinshaw's team in Europe in 1985.

He returned to Australia to drive for Ford for a couple of years before retiring in 1990 -a decision he feels he left a year or two late. He even managed to fit in time with the famous 1987 New Zealand America's Cup challenge: "My role was really to bring the sailors aboard the team."

Neville Crichton was no less active in business, taking on a chain of Ford dealerships in 1983 and turning it into the largest Ford dealer in New Zealand.

The next move was to take control of a public company in Australia in 1985. Ateco was originally an engineering business, but it had a licence to import cars into Australia and he could see the potential. Crichton made it enormously successful, importing Ferrari, Maserati, Great Wall, Chery, Kia, Citroën, Alfa Romeo and other car brands to the Australia and New Zealand market.

For most people racing sailboats, cars and building up a multi-million-dollar business would be enough. But Crichton had another string to his bow: luxury cruising superyachts.

Entering the superyacht world

"In 1982 I decided I'd build my own big boat, and I had ideas that you could build a good sailboat and sail well, but still have a good interior. And the steel boats we'd taken up (to the USA) were, to be truthful, dogs.

"I had W illiam Garden in Canada design me a boat and I built a 28 metre aluminium boat -that was the beginning of All oy Yachts. F rom then on we built another and another, and suddenly I'm in the boat building business."

The William Garden design was called  Chanel (now Lochiel ),  and although it was intended as a one-off, Ed Dubois' debut superyacht A quel II  (now P hilkade)  caught Crichton's eye. He commissioned a boat from Dubois: Es prit ( now Ec lipse). It was the first of nine Dubois designs built by Alloy Yachts for Crichton over the next two decades.

"I was the first one with carbon fibre rigs in the big superyachts," he says. "I was the first one to do boom furl, and that was probably the biggest step forward."

In this period there wasn't much sailboat racing. In 1992 he had built another 13.5 metre for the Two Ton Cup in Hawaii, then raced the boat for Ireland at the Admiral's Cup the following year.

But it was the new millennium when Crichton really shifted his focus away from building cruising superyachts and back to racing yachts. The first of his new generation of boats was a 24 metre, debuting at the Sydney-Hobart in 2000 -but it didn't finish the course.

"Probably we built it too lightly; we had a three-hour lead as we entered the Bass Strait. We might have got there (to Hobart) if we'd kept going, but we may not have," he says.

They turned back and even before they reached Australian soil a new boat had been planned. It was a water-ballasted Reichel/Pugh 27.4 metre and it was, as Crichton puts it, 'bulletproof'. It was built by " , called Alfa Romeo and ready for the 2002 Sydney to Hobart race.

'We won the Hobart with it, then shipped it up here and did Fastnet, Middle Sea, Maxi Worlds, Barcolana, Giraglia, we won everything, Portofino, every regatta we sailed in we won with the boat."

The game had changed, though, and canting keels were now possible under the rules. Crichton disagreed with the move, but had to act. "I knew if I didn't build one, somebody else would and we'd get blown away."

The third boat was a 30.5 metre Reichel/Pugh canting keel yacht. This time they led the Hobart all the way to the mouth of the River Derwent before getting passed by Wild Oats .

The boat then went up to Europe, 'winning everything that was to be won up here, virtually', before being reconfigured for the 2009 Transpac. They won that as well, taking more than 26 hours off the record. Alfa Romeo made the 2009 Sydney to Hobart her 147th consecutive line honours win before Crichton sold her.

Simply building a succession of world-beating maxi-boats is clearly not enough for this man, however. At the same time he also built the 41 metre motor yacht on which we have lunch, another boat by Alloy Yachts to a Dubois design.  Como  is largely a means of providing accommodation and support for the  Alfa Romeo  race boats, and will be replaced in the next couple of years by a 48 metre Feadship .

No more cruises

He enjoys these boats, taking them to the Monaco Grand Prix and Saint-Tropez, but will never repeat his year of cruising in the Pacific. "I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I don't think it's my scene," he tells me. Crichton has a need for competition. "I like the adrenaline of racing," he says, and when I ask if he'd prefer to race cars or sailboats he barely misses a beat. "Probably sailing; the yachting you can go on [with] competitively while you're still capable of walking."

So what of the future? "I'd love to do a new race boat, but the 30.5 metre class seems to be dead, and the 22 metre Mini-Maxi Class hasn't gone ahead like we all thought it would," he explains. "The only series that's going gangbusters at the moment are the big superyacht races, but it's not real racing, it's gentlemen going out racing their Bentleys and Rolls-Royces round on the water. And they're lovely boats, but it's not what I want to do -I want to be in a pure race boat."

And when Crichton says a pure race boat, he means it. "I've looked at a couple of used multihulls and I'm quite keen to have a go at a multihull. We're looking at that right now.' The plan is to go after some of the passage records, despite a stated preference for day sailing over long-distance races. And there's another problem.

"I've got to be a bit careful," he adds, "because if I go in the water I'm dead (because of the throat valve), so it's got to be a reasonably substantially sized multihull." He reflects, "Yachting wasn't the ideal thing to take up for someone with a tracheotomy, but it's my life and I don't even consider it as a safety issue."

It's not even in the back of his mind? Crichton shakes his head. "If it happens it happens, I'm so far ahead anyway it doesn't matter."

Few would argue. Look up 'life lived to the full' in the dictionary, and you might find a picture of Neville Crichton.

Sign up to BOAT Briefing email

Latest news, brokerage headlines and yacht exclusives, every weekday

By signing up for BOAT newsletters, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy .

More about this yacht

Similar yachts for sale, more stories, most popular, from our partners, sponsored listings.

Advertisement

Supported by

Lynch Yacht Sinking Off Sicily Proves as Baffling as It Is Tragic

As bodies were recovered, the authorities and experts wondered how a $40 million, stable and secure vessel could have sunk so quickly.

• Share full article

By Emma Bubola and Michael J. de la Merced

Emma Bubola reported from Porticello, Italy, and Michael J. de la Merced from London.

Two months after being cleared in a bruising legal battle over fraud charges, the British tech mogul Mike Lynch celebrated his freedom with a cruise. He invited his family, friends and part of his legal team on board his luxury sailing yacht, a majestic 180-foot vessel named Bayesian after the mathematical theorem around which he had built his empire.

On Sunday night, after a tour of the Gulf of Naples, including Capri, and volcanic islands in the Eolian archipelago, the boat anchored half a mile off the Sicilian coast in Porticello, Italy. It chose a stretch of water favored by the Phoenicians thousands of years ago for its protection from the mistral wind and, in more recent times, by the yachts of tech billionaires. The boat was lit “like a Christmas tree,” local residents said, standing out against the full moon.

But about 4 a.m., calamity unfolded. A violent and fast storm hit the area with some of the strongest winds locals said they had ever felt. Fabio Cefalù, a fisherman, said he saw a flare pierce the darkness shortly after 4.

Minutes later, the yacht was underwater. Only dozens of cushions from the boat’s deck and a gigantic radar from its mast floated on the surface of the sea, fishermen said.

In all, 22 people were on board, 15 of whom were rescued. Six bodies — five passengers and the ship’s cook — had been recovered by Thursday afternoon, including that of Mr. Lynch, an Italian government official said, adding that the search was continuing for his daughter.

It was a tragic and mystifying turn of events for Mr. Lynch, 59, who had spent years seeking to clear his name and was finally inaugurating a new chapter in his life. Experts wondered how a $40 million yacht, so robust and stable could have been sunk by a storm near a port within minutes.

“It drives me insane,” said Giovanni Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, which in 2022 bought the company, Perini, that made the Bayesian. “Following all the proper procedures, that boat is unsinkable.”

The aura of misfortune only deepened when it emerged that Stephen Chamberlain, 52, a former vice president of finance for Mr. Lynch’s former company and a co-defendant in the fraud case, was killed two days earlier, when he was hit by a car while jogging near his house in England.

Since June, the two men had been in a jubilant mood. A jury in San Francisco had acquitted both on fraud charges that could have sent them to prison for two decades. There were hugs and tears, and they and their legal teams went for a celebratory dinner party at a restaurant in the city, said Gary S. Lincenberg, a lawyer for Mr. Chamberlain.

The sea excursion was meant as a thank-you by Mr. Lynch to those who had helped him in his legal travails. Among the guests was Christopher J. Morvillo, 59, a scion of a prominent New York family of lawyers who had represented Mr. Lynch for 12 years. He and his wife, Neda, 57, were among the missing.

So, too, was Jonathan Bloomer, 70, a veteran British insurance executive who chaired Morgan Stanley International and the insurer Hiscox.

The body of the ship’s cook, Recaldo Thomas, was recovered. All the other crew members survived. Among them was Leo Eppel, 19, of South Africa, who was on his first yacht voyage working as a deck steward, said a friend, who asked not to be identified.

Since the sinking, the recovery effort and investigation have turned the tiny port town of Porticello, a quiet enclave where older men sit bare-chested on balconies, into what feels like the set of a movie.

Helicopters have flown overhead. Ambulances have sped by with the sirens blaring. The Coast Guard has patrolled the waters off shore, within sight of a cordoned-off dock that had been turned into an emergency headquarters.

On Wednesday afternoon, a church bell tolled after the first body bag was loaded into an ambulance, a crowd watching in silence.

The survivors were sheltering in a sprawling resort near Porticello, with a view of the shipwreck spot, and had so far declined to comment.

Attilio Di Diodato, director of the Italian Air Force’s Center for Aerospace Meteorology and Climatology, said that the yacht had most likely been hit by a fierce “down burst” — when air generated within a thunderstorm descends rapidly — or by a waterspout , similar to a tornado over water.

He added that his agency had put out rough-sea warnings the previous evening, alerting sailors about storms and strong winds. Locals said the winds “felt like an earthquake.”

Mr. Costantino, the boat executive, said the yacht had been specifically designed for having a tall mast — the second-tallest aluminum mast in the world. He said the Bayesian was an extremely safe and secure boat that could list even to 75 degrees without capsizing.

But he said that if some of the hatches on the side and in the stern, or some of the deck doors, had been open, the boat could have taken on water and sunk. Standard procedure in such storms, he said, is to switch on the engine, lift the anchor and turn the boat into the wind, lowering the keel for extra stability, closing doors and gathering the guests in the main hall inside the deck.

12 guests occupied the yacht’s six cabins. There were also 10 crew members.

Open hatches, doors and cabin windows could have let in water during a storm, according to the manufacturer.

Open hatches, doors and

cabin windows could

have let in water

during a storm,

according to the

manufacturer.

Source: Superyacht Times, YachtCharterFleet, MarineTraffic

By Veronica Penney

The New York Times attempted to reach the captain, James Cutfield, who had survived, for comment through social media, his brother and the management company of the yacht (which did not hire the crew), but did not make contact.

So far none of the surviving crew members have made a public statement about what happened that night.

Fabio Genco, the director of Palermo’s emergency services, who treated some of the survivors, said that the victims had recounted feeling as if the boat was being lifted, then suddenly dropped, with objects from the cabins falling on them.

The Italian Coast Guard said it had deployed a remotely operated vehicle that can prowl underwater for up to seven hours at a depth of more than 980 feet and record videos and images that they hoped would help them reconstruct the dynamics of the sinking. Such devices were used during the search and rescue operations of the Titan vessel that is believed to have imploded last summer near the wreckage of the Titanic.

After rescuers broke inside the yacht, they struggled to navigate the ropes and many pieces of furniture cluttering the vessel, said Luca Cari, a spokesman for Italy’s national firefighter corps.

Finally, as of Thursday morning, they had managed to retrieve all but one of the missing bodies, and hopes of finding the missing person alive were thin. “Can a human being be underwater for two days?” Mr. Cari asked.

What was certain was that Mr. Lynch’s death was yet another cruel twist of fate for a man who had spent years seeking to clear his name.

He earned a fortune in technology and was nicknamed Britain’s Bill Gates. But for more than a decade, he had been treated as anything but a respected tech leader.

He was accused by Hewlett-Packard, the American technological pioneer that had bought his software company, Autonomy, for $11 billion, of misleading it about his company’s worth. (Hewlett-Packard wrote down the value of the transaction by about $8.8 billion, and critics called it one of the worst deals of all time .) He had been increasingly shunned by the British establishment that he sought to break into after growing up working-class outside London.

He was extradited to San Francisco to face criminal charges, and confined to house arrest and 24-hour surveillance on his dime. In a townhouse in the Pacific Heights neighborhood — with security people he jokingly told associates were his “roommates” — he spent his mornings talking with researchers whom he funded personally on new applications for artificial intelligence. Afterward, he devoted hours to discussing legal strategy with his team.

Despite his persistent claims of innocence, even those close to Mr. Lynch had believed his odds of victory were slim. Autonomy’s chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, was convicted in 2018 of similar fraud charges and spent five years in prison.

During Mr. Lynch’s house arrest, his brother and mother died. His wife, Angela Bacares, frequently flew over from England, and she became a constant presence in the San Francisco courtroom during the trial.

After he was finally acquitted, Mr. Lynch had his eye on the future. “I am looking forward to returning to the U.K. and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field,” he said.

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Pallanza, Italy.

Emma Bubola is a Times reporter based in Rome. More about Emma Bubola

Michael J. de la Merced has covered global business and finance news for The Times since 2006. More about Michael J. de la Merced

Sicily Yacht Company CEO Shares "Endless" Errors That May Have Led to Fatal Sinking Tragedy

After the sinking of a yacht off the coast of sicily that left six people—including tech tycoon mike lynch—dead, ceo giovanni costantino is shedding light on the errors that could have been avoided..

The CEO behind the sunken superyacht believes the tragedy in Sicily could have been prevented. 

Just days after  superyacht the Bayesian sank off the coast of Palermo, Italy  during a freak storm early Aug. 19,  Giovanni Costantino , the founder and CEO of The Italian Sea Group which owns the company that built the ship in 2008, is shedding light on what he believes was an "endless chain of errors from the crew."

"Everything that was done reveals a very long summation of errors," he told Italian newspaper  Corriere della Sera  Aug. 21, in an interview translated from Italian. "The people should not have been in the cabins, the boat should not have been at anchor."

As Costantino explained, the crew should have known about the storm, calling the claim that it was sudden and unexpected untrue.

"It was all predictable. I have the weather charts here in front of me," he said. "Ask yourself: why were no fishermen from Porticello out that night? A fisherman reads the weather conditions and a ship doesn't? The storm was fully legible in all the weather charts. It couldn't have been ignored."

The CEO also asserted the Bayesian was "one of the safest boats in the world" and practically "unsinkable."

"I'm saying that, in fact, mistakes were made," he added. "There's a world between the arrival of a storm and the loading of water. A series of activities had to be done to avoid finding ourselves in that situation."

In order to have avoided the tragedy, he explains that the first step would have been to armor the hull and deck "by closing all the doors and hatches, after having placed the guests in the assembly point of the ship as per emergency procedure."

Twenty-two people were originally on the yacht when it sank, including 10 crew members and 12 guests. The group had come together to  celebrate the acquittal  of tech tycoon  Mike Lynch  on charges of fraud related to Hewlett Packard's $11 billion takeover of his company Autonomy Corp.

Unfortunately,  Lynch's body was recovered on Aug. 22  from the ship's hull. The bodies of Morgan Stanley International Chairman  Jonathan Bloomer  and his wife  Judy Bloomer  and Clifford Chance lawyer  Chris Morvillo  and his wife  Neda Morvillo   had been recovered on Aug. 21 .

Lynch's 18-year-old daughter  Hannah  is the sixth and final missing person, with rescuers still searching for her.

In all, 15 of the 22 passengers survived the wreckage—one of them Lynch's wife  Angela Bacares —while the body of the ship's cook  Renaldo   Thomas  was recovered following the sinking.

One survivor,  Charlotte Golunski ,  recounted the harrowing experience , sharing how she, her 1-year-old  Sophie  and partner  James Emsley  survived.

"For two seconds, I lost my daughter in the sea, then quickly hugged her amid the fury of the waves," she told Italian newspaper  La Repubblica  Aug. 20, per the  BBC . "It was all dark. In the water I couldn't keep my eyes open. I screamed for help but all I could hear around me was the screams of others." 

According to Golunski, a lifeboat was soon inflated that 11 of the survivors—including her family—climbed in.

Director of Sicily's Civil Protection Agency  Salvatore Cocina  had previously stated that it was likely a waterborne tornado—known as a waterspout—that struck the area and caused the tragedy.  He noted that the yacht was unfortunately  "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts

Sailing yachts like Mike Lynch's are 'unsinkable bodies', CEO of boat manufacturing firm says

Bayesian superyacht which sank off Italy is an "unsinkable" vessel, Giovanni Costantino, CEO of The Italian Sea Group, said.

By Ashna Hurynag, news correspondent and Eleonora Chiarella, producer

Sunday 25 August 2024 08:48, UK

Vessels like Mike Lynch's stricken superyacht are "unsinkable", according to the chief executive of the firm which makes and sells them.

Giovanni Costantino, CEO of The Italian Sea Group, told Sky News there are no flaws with the design and construction of the Bayesian superyacht which capsized in a storm off the coast of Porticello, Sicily, on Monday.

Five bodies were found by divers on Wednesday - taking the number of confirmed dead to six.

The Italian Sea Group also owns the firm that built British tech tycoon Mr Lynch's Bayesian, and Mr Costantino said the vessels "are the safest in the most absolute sense".

"Being the manufacturer of Perini [boats], I know very well how the boats have always been designed and built," he said.

"And as Perini is a sailing ship... sailing ships are renowned to be the safest ever."

He said their structure and keel made them "unsinkable bodies".

Read more on this story: Why search of superyacht wreck has been so difficult Hero mum 'slept with baby on deck when storm sank yacht'

Be the first to get Breaking News

Install the Sky News app for free

Mr Costantino said news of the sinking "put me in a state of sadness on one side and of disbelief on the other".

"This incident sounds like an unbelievable story, both technically and as a fact," he said.

It is understood Italian prosecutors investigating the incident are continuing to hold interviews with the survivors.

On Tuesday they questioned the captain for more than two hours to help reconstruct what happened and provide useful technical details.

Four British inspectors are also in Porticello and have begun a preliminary assessment of events.

It is understood they will look at all relevant aspects of the incident, including the design, stability, and operation of the vessel. They will also examine the effects of the weather conditions experienced.

Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News

Twenty-two people were on board the vessel, 15 of whom were rescued - including Briton Charlotte Golunski and her one-year-old daughter Sofia.

Divers will resume efforts on Thursday morning to bring ashore a body they found earlier. One more person remains missing.

Related Topics

• Superyacht sinking

• Updated Terms of Use
• New Privacy Policy
• Your Privacy Choices
• Closed Caption Policy
• Accessibility Statement

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ©2024 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Legal Statement . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper .

Luxury yacht captain faces manslaughter investigation after deaths of British tech mogul, 6 others

Bayesian captain james cutfield under investigation after yacht sinks, kills 7.

Moment luxury yacht sinks off coast of Italy caught on camera, with 6 presumed dead

Grainy CCTV footage shows the moment a storm struck the Bayesian luxury yacht, which sank Aug. 19, 2024, off the coast of Italy. Six people are missing, officials say. (Giornale di Sicilia)

The captain of the superyacht that sank off the coast of Italy last week during severe weather, killing seven, is under probe by Italian prosecutors.

James Cutfield, 51, of New Zealand, is under investigation on suspicion of manslaughter and culpable shipwreck, Italian media reported Monday.

He and 15 others survived the sinking of the Bayesian. British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, his daughter Hannah and five others died. 

"The Bayesian was built to go to sea in any weather," Franco Romani, a nautical architect who was part of the team that designed the yacht, told daily La Stampa in an interview published on Monday. He added that the yacht could have taken on water from a left open side hatch.

Prosecutors said the event was "extremely rapid" and could have been a "downburst" – a localized, powerful wind that descends from a thunderstorm and spreads out rapidly upon hitting the ground.

BRITISH TECH ENTREPRENEUR, AMERICANS AMONG MISSING AFTER YACHT SINKS OFF ITALIAN COAST, KILLING AT LEAST 1

James Cutfield was captain of the Bayesian at the time of its sinking off the Italian coast.  (Facebook/James Cutfield)

Similar to U.S. law, being investigated does not imply guilt nor that formal charges will be filed against Cutfield. 

On Saturday, chief prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio not only confirmed an investigation, but said his team will also consider each possible element of responsibility, including those of the captain, the crew, individuals in charge of supervision and the yacht’s manufacturer.

MORGAN STANLEY INTERNATIONAL CHAIRMAN, WIFE AND 4 OTHERS STILL MISSING AFTER LUXURY YACHT SINKS OFF SICILY

Italian firefighter divers work at the site of a shipwreck, in Porticello, Sicily, southern Italy, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Salvatore Cavalli)

The Bayesian was a 184-foot British-flagged luxury yacht deemed "unsinkable" by its manufacturer, Italian shipyard Perini Navi. 

Its crew survived the sinking, minus the chef. Six passengers were trapped in the hull. 

This picture taken on Sunday, Aug. 18, 2024, shows the Bayesian, left, and the Duch sailboat Sir Robert Baden Powell at anchor off the Sicilian village of Porticello near Palermo, in southern Italy. (Fabio La Bianca/Baia Santa Nicolicchia via AP)

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Fox News Digital spoke with eSysman of the YouTube channel eSysman SuperYachts , to find out what could have gone wrong with the vessel. 

"Obviously, any voyage plan will take into account the weather. Wind, wave sizes, and frequencies of the waves will be studied and precise prediction of weather has improved over the years, but it’s still not 100%," the host said, noting that it is ultimately the captain who is responsible for the vessel. 

Fox News' Bradford Betz, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Antisemitism Exposed

Fox News' Antisemitism Exposed" newsletter brings you stories on the rising anti-Jewish prejudice across the U.S. and the world."

By entering your email and clicking the Subscribe button, you agree to the Fox News Privacy Policy and Terms of Use , and agree to receive content and promotional communications from Fox News. You understand that you can opt-out at any time.

You've successfully subscribed to this newsletter!

Video shows moments before superyacht went down in storm off Sicily

Newly released video captures a luxury superyacht being battered by a violent storm before it suddenly sank off Sicily with 22 people aboard Monday.

The grainy images obtained by NBC News and other outlets were recorded on closed-circuit television not far from where the Bayesian was anchored, about a half-mile from the port of Porticello, on Sicily’s northern coast .

The yacht's 250-foot mast, illuminated with lights and lashed by the storm, appears to bend to one side before it finally disappears and is replaced by darkness.

The speed with which a yacht built to handle the roughest seas capsized stunned maritime experts.  

“I can’t remember the last time I read about a vessel going down quickly like that, you know, completely capsizing and going down that quickly, a vessel of that nature, a yacht of that size,” said Stephen Richter of SAR Marine Consulting.

British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and five of the 22 other people who were aboard the 184-foot vessel remain unaccounted for and are believed to be trapped in the Bayesian’s hull, nearly 170 feet underwater.

Officials confirmed Monday that at least one person, the ship’s cook, had died.  

Superyachts like the Bayesian, which had been available for charters at a rate of $215,000 a week, are designed to stay afloat even as they are taking on water to give the people aboard a chance to escape, Richter said. 

“Boats of this size, they’re taking passengers on an excursion or a holiday,” Richter said. “They are not going to put them in situations where it may be dangerous or it may be uncomfortable, so this storm that popped up was obviously an anomaly. These vessels that carry passengers, they’re typically very well-maintained, very well-appointed.”

Built by Italian shipbuilder Perini Navi in 2008, the U.K.-registered Bayesian could carry 12 guests and a crew of up to 10, according to online specialist yacht sites. Its nearly 250-foot mast is the tallest aluminum sailing mast in the world, according to CharterWorld Luxury Yacht Charters. 

On Tuesday, Italian rescue workers resumed the search for Lynch and the five other passengers still missing: Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah; Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife; and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife.

“The fear is that the bodies got trapped inside the vessel,” Salvatore Cocina, the head of civil protection in Sicily, told Reuters .

The Bayesian is owned by a firm linked to Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who was one of the 15 people rescued Monday after it capsized.

“It’s extremely rare for a boat of this size to sink,” Richter said.

What’s not rare is the kind of storm that sank it , said Simon Boxall, senior lecturer in oceanography at Britain’s University of Southampton.

“People assume the Mediterranean is this rather calm and passive place that never gets storms and always blue skies,” Boxall said. “In fact, you get some quite horrendous storms that are not uncommon at this time of year.”

The president of Italy’s meteorological society has said Monday’s violent storm may have involved a waterspout, essentially a tornado over water, or a downburst, which occurs more frequently but doesn’t involve the rotation of the air.

Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian Meteorology Society, also said recent temperatures may have been a factor. 

“The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees Celsius [86 Fahrenheit], which is almost 3 degrees more than normal,” Mercalli told Reuters. “This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms.”

The Mediterranean sailing vacation was designed to be a celebration for Lynch, who two months ago was acquitted by a San Francisco jury of fraud charges stemming from the 2011 sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion.

Prosecutors alleged that Lynch, dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates,” and Autonomy’s vice president for finance, Stephen Chamberlain, had padded the firm’s finances ahead of the sale. Lynch’s lawyers argued that HP was so eager to acquire Autonomy that it failed to adequately check the books .

Lynch had taken Morvill, who was one of his defense attorneys, on the luxury trip. 

Chamberlain was not on the Bayesian.

In what appears to be a tragic coincidence, a car struck and killed Chamberlain on Saturday as he was jogging in a village about 68 miles north of London, local police said.

“Steve fought successfully to clear his good name at trial earlier this year, and his good name now lives on through his wonderful family,” Chamberlain’s lawyer, Gary Lincenberg, said in a statement .

Henry Austin reported from London and Corky Siemaszko from New York City.

Henry Austin is a senior editor for NBC News Digital based in London.

Corky Siemaszko is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital.

Zara’s 88-year-old billionaire owner has taken delivery of his brand new $300 million superyacht. The 302-feet-long Drizzle, which packs a mammoth 1 MW battery pack, is one of the most efficient luxury vessels in the world.”

You may also like

Jeff Bezos’ $500 million Koru superyacht is so big that it took up two docking spaces and dwarfed every other yacht berthed at the Grande Marina in the US Virgin Islands

Facing bankruptcy, this enterprising tycoon, nicknamed the German Bill Gates, is selling his Lürssen superyacht at an unheard discount of $30 million. Longer than an Olympic-sized swimming pool, the six-decker luxury vessel has a spa, a massive master suite, and a helipad.

After keeping its tracking device switched off for over a month, the $300 million superyacht Alaiya linked to sanctioned Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov has suddenly appeared in Greece.

Loved by Michael Jordan this $72 million superyacht is a billionaire’s pet – The 230-feet vessel ‘Joy’ has a cinema, spa, a semi-open gym, and a basketball court.

The 90m Conch Superyacht is inspired by seashells

Its bar has $153,000 worth of rare wines and spirits alone. The Russian billionaire’s auctioned superyacht has so many luxury items onboard that the authorities have no idea of what to do with them.

This luxury yacht is custom built for adventurers and comes with its own hovercraft, amphibious car and a jet ski

Take a look at the world’s first superyacht powered by hydrogen, which is produced onboard from seawater. This eco-friendly vessel, at 279 feet long, boasts avant-garde features and is perfect for the climate-conscious billionaire.

Roman Abramovich’s newest megayacht is a $610 million fortress – Solaris can zap drones mid-air, it has secret pirate-proof passageways, a radar-based anti-missile system, bulletproof windows, & armored cabins.

The 'Bayesian' Yacht Owner Is Missing After a Tornado Sank the Luxury Vessel

T he 184-foot luxury yacht called The Bayesian sank off the coast of Palermo, Italy on Monday, Aug. 19, 2024. Per CNN , six passengers are still missing at the time of writing — the original manifest included 22 people on board.

It's being reported that 15 people were rescued, and one passenger died. One of the missing is Mike Lynch, a tech entrepreneur whose wife's firm, Revcom, technically owns the superyacht. Mike has a very interesting past, which involves one of the biggest fraud cases in Silicon Valley history.

Read on for details.

So, who is Mike Lynch, the 'Bayesian' yacht owner who is missing?

According to The Washington Post , Mike is not accounted for after The Bayesian sank near Sicily in what's being called a "freak storm." Reportedly, the yacht's mast broke due to high winds, and the huge vessel sank.

The unthinkable accident resulted in Mike's 18-year-old daughter Hannah also being missing.

His wife, Angela Bacares, was reportedly rescued.

Per the outlet, Mike has been referred to as "Britain’s version of Bill Gates ." His company, Autonomy, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion over a decade ago.

But as AP News reports, that mega-deal soured when Mike was accused of falsifying documents leading up to the sale of Autonomy. A multi-year court case ensued, with Mike eventually being cleared of charges in the United States. Still, per the outlet, he was not done dealing with a civil case in his native Britain at the time of the yacht accident.

Mike Lynch's co-defendant was killed the same week the 'Bayesian' sank.

In a turn of events worthy of a movie, Mike's co-defendant in the case against him died on Saturday, just a few days before The Bayesian plummeted to 160 feet below the surface of the sea.

Stephen Chamberlain, who was killed by a car while jogging in England, was the former vice-president of finance for Autonomy, per The Guardian . He was initially placed on life support but later died.

Given the incredibly coincidental nature of the two awful tragedies, of course, conspiracy theories are cropping up on social media.

Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that Christopher Morvillo, the lawyer who helped clear the men of charges in the U.S., is among those missing after The Bayesian sank, per the New York Post .

Two months before going missing, Christopher oddly posted to LinkedIn for the first time .

"Following the jury's swift exoneration of our client, Mike Lynch, and his colleague, Steven Chamberlain, last week in San Francisco, I finally have something to say that I would like others to hear," he wrote in part.

After thanking many people who helped win the case, he finished the post by writing, "A huge thank you to my patient and incredible wife, Neda Morvillo, and my two strong, brilliant, and beautiful daughters, Sabrina Morvillo and Sophia Morvillo. None of this would have been possible without your love and support. I am so glad to be home. And they all lived happily ever after…."

Mike Lynch won a dramatic 12-year legal battle over his tech company. Weeks later, he and his top lawyer are dead.

• Mike Lynch won an unexpected jury acquittal after a dramatic 12-year legal saga.
• HP accused him of cooking the books of his company Autonomy to make it seem worth billions more.
• He finally won — and then he, his lawyer, and his codefendant all died within days.

In 2011, Mike Lynch was the toast of the tech world.

Hailed as Britain's Bill Gates, Lynch sold Autonomy, his groundbreaking data-management company, to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion.

Shareholders and business commentators were puzzled about what HP, a hardware company, would do with Autonomy, a software company — and why the latter was worth $11 billion. HP's executives said at the time that Autonomy had the potential to transform HP and usher the Silicon Valley titan into a new generation.

None of that happened. A year after the acquisition, HP wrote down $8.8 billion of the purchase value and accused Lynch of lying about Autonomy's finances.

The claim led to a vicious decadelong series of legal disputes.

Another Autonomy executive, Sushovan Hussain, was convicted of fraud in 2018 and sentenced to five years in prison. Federal prosecutors brought criminal charges against Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, the company's former vice president of finance.

Lynch's court battles concluded with a three-month criminal trial in San Francisco. After just two days of deliberation, jurors found Lynch and Chamberlain not guilty on all counts.

"The truth has finally prevailed," his lawyer Chris Morvillo said.

Within months, Lynch, Chamberlain, and Morvillo were all dead.

A takeover doomed from the start

Lynch, who studied neural networks for his Ph.D. at Cambridge University, spun off Autonomy from a previous company, Cambridge Neurodynamics, in 1996.

Using sophisticated algorithms, Autonomy allowed users to organize and search through large amounts of unstructured data. It was a bright spot in Britain's tech industry and was listed on the country's stock-market index.

Autonomy's clients included Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, AT&T, and HP itself. But HP's purchase of Autonomy was controversial.

The hardware company's CEO, Léo Apotheker , who had been in the position for less than a year, tried to shift the company's direction. HP had struggled to sell printers and servers as part of its traditional hardware business. Apotheker wanted to spin off HP's personal-computing division and make a big bet on moving the company into software, which had higher margins.

Analysts hated the idea. Shareholders sued. HP's value dropped by more than half. The company's board fired Apotheker within weeks of the decision to buy Autonomy, before the deal even closed.

Related stories

His successor, Meg Whitman, fired Lynch and wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion, which indicated HP paid nearly four times what it should have. The New York Times columnist James B. Stewart floated the case that it was the worst acquisition in corporate history — even worse than AOL's ill-fated purchase of Time Warner.

In a stunning move, HP accused Lynch of fraud the following year. The company alleged he and Hussain, a former CFO, inflated Autonomy's sales figures. The FBI and the UK's Serious Fraud Office both opened investigations.

Lynch fervently denied accusations of wrongdoing. He pointed out that Autonomy was audited by Deloitte, which hadn't found issues. Lynch said HP stifled Autonomy with mismanagement and bureaucracy that pushed out employees and stymied sales.

The culture at HP, he said, was poisonous.

"It was like boarding a plane, realizing the engine is on fire, and then going up to the cockpit only to find that the pilots are having a fight," he told The Telegraph at the time .

According to The New York Times, lawyers representing shareholders in the lawsuit against HP obtained a copy of the company's own KPMG-prepared due-diligence report. The report said that Autonomy wasn't transparent enough with its finances, but Apotheker moved forward with the takeover anyway, deciding that Autonomy's potential was worth it.

A legal morass

The UK's Serious Fraud Office announced in January 2015 that it closed its investigation into Autonomy, finding insufficient evidence for legal action, though it referred some issues to the US Justice Department.

In the subsequent months, HP and Lynch sued each other in the UK. As those cases wound their way through the British court system, US prosecutors continued investigating HP's purchase of Autonomy. In 2016, they brought fraud charges against Hussain, who was found guilty in a 2018 jury trial. British regulators formally barred him from the financial industry earlier this year after he completed a five-year sentence in the US.

HP unloaded Autonomy altogether, selling parts of it in 2016 and 2017.

In November 2018, Justice Department prosecutors went directly after Lynch and Chamberlain.

Their indictment accused Lynch and Chamberlain of falsifying financial documents, lying to auditors and regulators, and suppressing the voices of people who criticized Autonomy's financial practices.

Lynch was no longer looking at civil fights over money. He was facing the prospect of up to 20 years in prison.

For years, Lynch fought extradition to the US. Powerful in British political circles — he had advised David Cameron when Cameron was prime minister and served on the boards of the BBC and the British Museum — he and his lawyers argued that his legal issues should play out in the UK, not the US. American criminal laws were unfairly stacked against him, his lawyers said.

HP's lawsuit against Lynch — still churning in the background — finally went to trial in 2019. Apotheker testified he would have abandoned the Autonomy acquisition if he had a better understanding of its finances. Lynch argued that the whole morass was orchestrated by Whitman, Apotheker's successor, who harbored political ambitions (she ran for governor in California and is currently the US ambassador to Kenya) and wanted to shift the blame for Autonomy's failures to someone else.

Robert Hildyard, the judge who oversaw the case, ruled mostly in HP's favor. In a 2022 decision that ran over 1,700 pages, he wrote that HP overpaid for Autonomy because of deceit from Lynch and Hussain. Hildyard hadn't yet decided how much they would owe in damages, but he wrote it would be "substantially less" than the $5 billion HP asked for.

When he wasn't fighting legal battles, Lynch continued to be an entrepreneur. He founded a venture-capital firm, Invoke Capital, and invested in and helped run the cybersecurity firm Darktrace, which,  Politico reported, has deep ties  to Britain's intelligence agencies.

Financial disclosures Lynch filed last year as part of his criminal case indicated he was worth about $450 million.

The criminal trial

The UK finally extradited Lynch to the US in May 2023 , where he prepared for his trial — alongside Chamberlain as a codefendant — while under house arrest in San Francisco.

Lynch had a top-shelf legal team, but after the British court loss and Hussain's conviction, the chances of an acquittal seemed bleak.

Lynch testified at the end of his three-month trial, which began in March, telling jurors he wasn't involved in day-to-day financial oversight of the company. Misunderstandings, he said, could be chalked up to the differences between British and American accounting practices.

"A lot of what we've been looking at is like peering through the door of a kitchen and seeing the sausage-making machine, and that's how it really works," he told jurors, according to The Times of London . "If you take the microscope into even the most spotless kitchen, you'd find bacteria. If it wasn't there, that'd be something very abnormal. I don't think Autonomy was any different."

Jurors believed him. In June, they declared Lynch not guilty of the 15 charges against him, clearing Chamberlain as well.

Morvillo, one of Lynch's lawyers in the trial — as well as in the preceding decade of legal disputes — praised the jury, saying it had rejected "the government's profound overreach in this case."

"This verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP's well-documented ineptitude on Dr. Lynch," Morvillo said in a joint statement with his attorney colleague Brian Heberlig. "Thankfully, the truth has finally prevailed."

In an interview with The Times of London after the trial , Lynch reflected on how, with a great burden lifted off him at the age of 59, he could remake his life.

He mourned the deaths of his brother and mother, who both died ahead of the criminal trial. He mused about using his fortune to start a British version of the Innocence Project, which prevents wrongful convictions in the US.

"Now you have a second life," he told The Times. "The question is, what do you want to do with it?"

But first, a celebration. Lynch; his wife, Angela Bacares; one of his two daughters; Morvillo and his wife, Neda; and several others went on a superyacht, the Bayesian , which was anchored outside Sicily and owned by Bacares.

Chamberlain moved back to the UK. While running near his home, a driver hit him with a car . He died in a hospital on Saturday.

On Monday, a sudden storm struck the Bayesian. The yacht capsized.

Of its 22 passengers, 15, including Bacares, were rescued.

But rescuers have pulled five bodies from the wreckage, including Morvillo's and Lynch's . A sixth remains trapped inside the boat. Lynch's daughter Hannah remains missing.

Correction: August 22, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misnamed Lynch's lawyer. His name was Chris Morvillo, not Charles Morvillo.

• Main content

Who Owns Which Superyacht? (A Complete Guide)

Have you ever wondered who owns the most luxurious, extravagant, and expensive superyachts? Or how much these lavish vessels are worth? In this complete guide, we’ll explore who owns these magnificent vessels, what amenities they hold, and the cost of these incredible yachts.

Get ready to explore the world of superyachts and the people who own them!

Short Answer

For example, Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, owns the Rising Sun, which is the 11th largest superyacht in the world.

Overview of Superyachts

The term superyacht refers to a large, expensive recreational boat that is typically owned by the worlds wealthy elite.

Superyachts can range in price from $30 million to an astonishingly high $400 million.

The most expensive superyacht in the world is owned by the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

In conclusion, owning a superyacht is an exclusive status symbol for the world’s wealthy elite.

Who are the Owners of Superyachts?

From Hollywood celebrities to tech billionaires, superyacht owners come from all walks of life.

Many are everyday people who have worked hard and saved up to purchase their dream vessel.

These luxurious vessels come with hefty price tags that can range from $30 million to over $400 million.

Many of these yachts are designed to the owner’s exact specifications, ensuring that each one is totally unique and reflects the owner’s individual tastes and personality.

The Most Expensive Superyacht in the World

When it comes to superyachts, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar, certainly knows how to make a statement.

In addition, the Al Mirqab features a helipad, swimming pool, and even an outdoor Jacuzzi.

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos all own luxurious vessels.

Other notable owners of superyachts include Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns the $200 million Kingdom 5KR, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who owns the $200 million Rising Sun.

With their impressive size, luxurious amenities, and hefty price tags, these vessels have become a symbol of wealth and prestige.

Notable Superyacht Owners

At the top of the list is the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who holds the distinction of owning the most expensive superyacht in the world.

The amenities that come with these vessels vary greatly from owner to owner, but they almost always include luxurious swimming pools, helicopter pads, on-board cinemas, and spas.

Whether you’re trying to impress your peers or just looking to enjoy a luxurious outing, owning a superyacht is the ultimate way to show off your wealth.

What Amenities are Included on Superyachts?

The cost of a superyacht can range from $30 million to over $400 million, but the price tag doesnt quite capture the sheer extravagance and amenities of these vessels.

The interior of a superyacht can be custom-designed to the owners specifications.

Some vessels even come with a full-service gym, complete with exercise equipment and trained professionals.

Many yachts come with outdoor entertainment areas, complete with full kitchens, dining rooms, and lounge areas.

No matter what amenities a superyacht has, it is sure to be an experience like no other.

How Much Do Superyachts Cost?

When it comes to superyachts, the sky is the limit when it comes to cost.

The cost of a superyacht is driven by a variety of factors, including size, amenities, and customization.

The bigger the yacht, the more luxurious features and amenities it will have.

From swimming pools and helicopter pads to on-board cinemas and spas, the sky is the limit when it comes to customizing a superyacht.

Many luxury vessels have custom-designed interiors that are tailored to the owners tastes.

While some may be able to get away with spending a few million dollars, others may end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars on their dream yacht.

Keeping Superyachts Out of the Public Eye

Understandably, these individuals are concerned with privacy and discretion, and therefore tend to take measures to ensure their yachts are not visible to outsiders.

In addition to physical security, some superyacht owners also use technology to keep their vessels out of the public eye.

Finally, some superyacht owners also choose to limit the number of people who have access to their vessels.

These individuals may be required to sign non-disclosure agreements to ensure they do not disclose any information about the yacht or its owner.

Final Thoughts

Superyachts are a symbol of luxury and status, and the list of yacht owners reads like a who’s who of billionaires.

Whether you’re looking to purchase one or just curious to learn more about the owners and their amenities, this guide will provide you with all the information you need to stay up to date with the superyacht scene.

Recent Posts

The human side of yacht ownership

How would you characterise the typical yacht owner? Whatever you may have been led to believe, the truth is simple: for most, it’s about using their yachts for precious family time, and for many it’s also about using their yachts for good.

There’s a theme that is repeated on countless yachts large and small the world over – superyachting, for most, is not about being seen but rather the opposite. It’s about yacht families and their friends enjoying precious, private moments away from the pressures of demanding business lives and the long hours running those businesses can entail.

“I have an extended family, and when our schedules allow we all like to gather on the yacht and spend some quality time as a family,” Douglas Barrowman , owner of the yacht Turquoise , told Superyacht Life back in 2017. “There is no place like a yacht for family togetherness.”

Douglas Barrowman with family

A love of the sea, adventure and technology

Superyachts and yacht ownership are also a way to explore the world around us, and to interact with and grow to understand extraordinarily diverse communities from remote Pacific islands to the Scandinavian Arctic. It’s something that inspired tech entrepreneur Jasper Smith to combine his love of adventure and his love of the sea with an opportunity for owners to give back while indulging their passion.

“I have always had a deep passion for the ocean,” Smith says. “I grew up watching Jacques Cousteau movies and being enthralled at the idea of being challenged by an endeavour.” When he set out to find his own perfect explorer yacht, however, he realised it didn’t yet exist. His answer was to create Arksen. “My aim with Arksen was to create the perfect machines to enable adventure,” he enthuses. “I also wanted to build sustainable boats which considered full life cycles, from material sourcing to recycling.”

That’s not all – Arksen also asks owners of its yachts to sign up to a pledge it calls 10% for the Ocean, where they will donate 10% of their vessel’s time to philanthropic activities. “A lot of people who have the money feel a responsibility to try and make sure that the oceans are well looked after,” Smith explains. “The people that are attracted to Arksen are passionate about the ocean and want to go off on slightly more advanced expeditions and trips. With that audience, there is a tremendous buy-in to the boat being for more than just their own purposes.”

Superyachts as a force for good

It speaks to the heart of the matter, which is that the superyacht industry and yacht owners in particular have a heart – they care about preserving the environment they enjoy, and they care about the communities they interact with who make them feel so welcome when they visit. It’s reflected in the smallest of gestures, such as donating materials and books to local schools, to the largest – helping with last-mile delivery of critical disaster relief. It’s about superyachts giving back.

It’s a positive-impact attitude toward humanity that is quietly typified by hundreds of superyacht owners, who often prefer to do their thing under the radar rather than take false glory for their philanthropic or humanitarian endeavours. For some it’s as straightforward as getting involved in projects with organisations like YachtAid Global . For others, their endeavours become a key reason for yachting.

American superyacht owner Carl Allen is a prime example of these philanthropic yacht owners. After selling his company, and having enjoyed chartering and owning yachts as a family for years, Allen set up Allen Explorations to deliver a full programme of projects, ranging from historical shipwreck searches and environmental research to disaster relief. Indeed, Allen’s support yacht Axis played a vital role in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian – one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the Bahamas.

“We had to drop everything and help after the hurricane,” says Allen. “ Axis delivered over £700,000 of supplies and made multiple trips to Little Grand island in the Bahamas. We’ve turned it into the epitome of how to organise hurricane relief.” The team helped get the local school back up and running, and organised for a group from Florida Power and Light to help restore power. “The island also lost their water tower,” he adds, “so we delivered four tanks on  Axis .”

Jasper Smith

Celebrating the good in the superyachting good life

From family time to time spent embracing the global family, superyacht owners have a far greater positive impact than many assume from preconceived ideas about what a superyacht is and the sort of person who owns or charters one. It’s one of the reasons The Superyacht Life Foundation, in association with the Monaco Yacht Show , has unveiled The Honours, which is a way to celebrate the people of our industry rather than the yachts which so often get sole focus. It’s about recognising the extraordinary contributions that people make, the change they inspire, the opportunities they create, and the lives they change.

On 26 September, the eve of the 2023 Monaco Yacht Show, three honourees – nominated by people from across the superyacht industry, and selected from a shortlist by an expert panel of industry judges – will be feted for their work and contribution to superyachting. These are industry professionals and yacht owners who epitomise what superyachting can do. These are people who highlight the good in the superyachting good life.

Yacht owners, impactful journeys

All around the globe, yacht owners are enjoying precious time on their yachts with family and friends, and many are also realising that their yachts can be a force for good and for change, tying in with their philanthropic works and humanitarian endeavours.

“Our yacht is a platform for much of our life,” offers Joe Anderson , co-owner of the Benovia Winery in California with his wife, Mary Dewane. “For instance, we used it at a fundraiser for cystic fibrosis in Baltimore at the 200th anniversary of the Star-Spangled Banner event. The Blue Angels were flying overhead and used Bella Una [the couple’s yacht] as a GPS coordinate and performed flybys, tipping their wings at us. It was quite a thrill. Having a yacht is a way to keep the family intact, enjoy time with friends and have fun.”

You may also like...

Seeking healthier waters in Menorca and beyond

Sunseeker and Blue Marine join forces for Project Menorca, aimed at protecting the seas around this popular Balearic island.

Family yacht travel in Turkey and beyond

Akin Ongor explains how his yacht helps him and his family to live in the moment.

Top five... ways to enjoy a festive family charter

Superyachts might bring to mind sunny beaches and summer holidays, but many families find that charters really come into their own over the festive period.

Do you work in the superyacht industry? Yes No I would like to receive updates from Superyacht Life

Don’t miss out

Sign up to our newsletter and get our latest stories delivered monthly to your inbox.

By SuperyachtNews 31 Aug 2022

The Superyacht Owner Report is Out Now!

The highly anticipated superyacht owner report is now available online...….

The Superyacht Owner Report is now available online! For those of you who are already members, you can access the link here , for those of you who are not, you can sign up to become an Essential Member here . The quickest, most efficient, and most environmentally friendly way to access our unrivalled journalism is via our online platform, and so we encourage all our loyal readers to make the digital transition. We are also pleased to announce that we will be offering a special discounted subscription at this year's Monaco Yacht Show . You can find us in Dars Sud - Stand DS98 - to meet the team, grab a drink and learn more about our membership offers .

The brief for this year's edition of The Superyacht Owner Report was to come up with something refreshing, insightful, and revelatory. After all, it is our 30th anniversary this year and we wanted to do something special, so we opened up a dialogue with some of the most exciting and candid market commentators in the superyacht industry. Our 30 for 30 section includes rising stars, experienced gurus, and visionary thinkers from a variety of different sectors. Instead of being retrospective, we thought it would be better to look into our crystal ball for the future and highlight the key aspects of our industry that need to become our focus of attention for the next 30 years.

The report would of course be incomplete without insight from superyacht owners. Our Editor Jack Hogan interviewed Steve Sidwell, owner of M/Y Ascente, about redefining the industry's approach to sustainable construction. We also spoke with Victor Vescovo about his incredible deep-sea expeditions and the potential we have as an industry to bring about positive environmental change.

We delved into the strange world of the metaverse and realised there was plenty of room for a new and improved superyacht industry. We spoke to Bernard d’Alessandri, General Secretary and Managing Director of Yacht Club de Monaco, about the hub's evolution from a cosy yacht club to a world knowledge bank. Our intelligence team also forensically examined the state of UHNWI's wealth, with a specific look into Billionaires, Millennials and the true potential of new money entering the yacht market.

We conclude The Superyacht Owner Report by confronting the issue of predatory behaviour in the superyacht industry. This topic is of course not exclusive to the superyacht industry, but nevertheless, there is a need to put pressure on those with the power to bring about real change, so that the perpetrators of abuse on board and shoreside face the consequences of their actions.

We are fully committed to working towards a greener superyacht industry. And we, as a team, aim to do all we can to ensure that we are part of the solution. That’s why we are encouraging our loyal readership to make the switch to digital media consumption, instead of print. And the best way to do that is to become part of The Superyacht Group Community . Issues of The Superyacht Report are only available to read to those with an Essential or Executive Membership .

Essential Membership grants members access to the full suite of business-critical content available across SuperyachtNews.com and The Superyacht Report, including access to our complete library of back issues, and unlimited access to SuperyachtIntel . To celebrate our 30th anniversary, we are offering you £30 off Essential Membership. 

Executive Membership includes delegate access to our flagship event in Amsterdam , The Superyacht Forum Live , and the industry’s most dynamic conference programme, broadcast from the industry’s leading superyacht hubs, as well as all features included within the Essential Membership .

Profile links

The Superyacht Group

Join the discussion

To post comments please Sign in or Register

When commenting please follow our house rules

Click here to become part of The Superyacht Group community, and join us in our mission to make this industry accessible to all, and prosperous for the long-term. We are offering access to the superyacht industry’s most comprehensive and longstanding archive of business-critical information, as well as a comprehensive, real-time superyacht fleet database, for just £10 per month, because we are One Industry with One Mission. Sign up here .

Related news

British company aims to attract superyacht owners with flying car concept

The new electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle has been named "The Axe"

Ferretti Group publishes H1 2022 financial report

Double-digit revenue growth and €1.2 billion order book backlog reported

Monaco Yacht Show releases first list of superyachts

A sneak peek at the yachts so far confirmed for the 2022 show

MYS 2022 is set to target Gen Z

Monaco Yacht Show organisers have said that their focus this year is to seduce and educate their audience

2 years ago

Sign up to the SuperyachtNews Bulletin

Receive unrivalled market intelligence, weekly headlines and the most relevant and insightful journalism directly to your inbox.

Sign up to the SuperyachtNews Bulletin

The superyachtnews app.

Follow us on

Media Pack Request

Please select exactly what you would like to receive from us by ticking the boxes below:

SuperyachtNews.com

Register to comment