Blackbox sheds light on the tragic final minutes of the billionaire's superyacht voyage

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It was supposed to be a summer party.

British tech tycoon Mike Lynch had gathered his trusted lawyers who had been with him every step of the way and helped him emerge unscathed from a grueling 13-year legal battle. Twelve guests from the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland had flown to the picturesque Italian port of Porticello, near Palermo, to celebrate the end of the fraud trial that had consumed much of their lives.

But a manslaughter investigation has now been launched as Mr Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were among seven people who died when the vessel capsized in bad weather in the early hours of Monday.

Morgan Stanley CEO Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judith Bloomer, Clifford Chance lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda Morvillo also died.

Italian prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio from the nearby town of Termini Imerese said his office had launched initial investigations into manslaughter and negligent navigation.

The group was welcomed by the crew of ten on board the £30 million, 56-metre superyacht Bayesian, in six luxurious suites. The yacht has the world's tallest aluminium mast – higher than Nelson's Column – and experts now speculate that this may have been the reason it overturned and became stuck underwater in an unpredictable, violent storm.

The ship was named after the statistical method of Bayesian inference, an 18th-century theory that helps meteorologists predict outcomes more reliably. Lynch based his entire doctoral dissertation on this theory and later amassed his vast fortune after selling his company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011.

He had won a surprise victory in a bitter US legal battle with the tech giant, convincing a jury that he was not guilty of charges of massive fraud after a long legal battle that finally ended in June. Two months ago, he left the courtroom a free man with tears in his eyes and vowed to change the extradition laws that had brought him to the US in handcuffs.

The disaster struck at around 5 a.m. when a freak tornado over the sea, known as a waterspout, rocked the superyacht, according to the Sicilian Civil Protection Agency. The crew fired disaster flares, after which local fishermen and others sailed through the storm to help the survivors.

The captain of a nearby boat said he turned on his engine as the wind picked up to maintain control of his vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian, which was anchored alongside him.

“We managed to keep the ship in position and when the storm was over, we noticed that the ship had disappeared behind us,” said Karsten Borner.

The other boat “lay flat on the water and then sank,” he added. He said his crew then found some of the survivors on a life raft and brought them aboard before the Coast Guard picked them up.

Among them was a one-year-old girl named Sophie, one of the 16 survivors so far.

Her mother, 36-year-old Charlotte Golunski, recounted how she struggled to hold her child above the dark and raging Mediterranean Sea while calling for help amid the horrific, piercing screams of the other struggling guests and crew.

“I lost the baby in the sea for two seconds, then immediately grabbed him in my arms again in the fury of the waves,” she told Giornale di Sicilia. “I held him tightly to me while the sea raged. So many people were screaming. Luckily the lifeboat was inflated and eleven of us managed to get in.”

Six passengers were missing – Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Jonathan Bloomer, non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley International, Chris Morvillo, lawyer at Clifford Chance, and their wives Judy and Neda.

The yacht's exhausted captain, James Catfield, simply said: “We didn't see that coming.”

“The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not to this extent,” said a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo the next day.

Local fisherman Giuseppe Cefalu said he saw a “tornado” near the port on Monday morning. Mr Cefalu said he and his brother Fabio saw a flare in the sky at around 5am.

The couple helped in efforts to find the people in the water after the yacht disappeared into the waves, but Mr Cefalu said he saw only cushions and a buoy.

He said the weather conditions on the morning of the sinking were “unbearable”, with “very strong” winds and rain.

Despite its sinking, the luxury superyacht lies “practically intact” on the seabed, Marco Tilotta, a fire department diver from Palermo, told the Italian newspaper “Il Messaggero”.

In an interview, he said that the multimillion-dollar yacht was lying on its side at a depth of 48 meters, but divers were not allowed access to it due to floating furnishings and other debris inside the yacht.

“There are fears that the bodies are trapped inside the ship,” which lies 49 meters deep, added Salvatore Cocina, head of civil protection in Sicily.

“The biggest difficulty is the depth, which does not allow for long operation times,” fire department diver Marco Tilotta told reporters. “We plan … to search centimeter by centimeter.”

According to Nick Sloane, one of the lead divers on the Costa Concordia wreck, 24 critical hours now lie ahead. He said: Sky News that survivors may be trapped in air pockets inside the ship, but that time is quickly running out to rescue them.

“You have a very small window of time to try to find the people trapped inside, where hopefully an air pocket has formed and they could be rescued.

“If the yacht is on its side, it may have more air pockets than if it is upright. It has a fairly large keel and that will certainly deflect it and put it on its side.”