Prominent Litigator Feared Dead After Superyacht Sinks Off Sicilian Coast
Prominent Litigator Feared Dead After Superyacht Sinks Off Sicilian Coast
He was celebrating with his client after winning across-the-board acquittals at a three-month trial in June.
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In June, Christopher Morvillo of Clifford Chance—who served as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan (S.D.N.Y.) from 1999 until 2005, before going on to become one of the nation’s top white-collar litigators—won a remarkable victory. After a lengthy federal fraud trial in San Francisco, he secured across-the-board acquittals for his client, Dr. Mike Lynch—a British software mogul known as “Britain’s Bill Gates.”
Lynch founded and led Autonomy, a business-software company that Hewlett-Packard bought for $11 billion in 2011. In 2012, Hewlett-Packard took an $8.8 billion writedown on the acquisition, alleging “serious accounting improprieties”—and more than a decade of civil and criminal litigation followed, including Lynch’s criminal trial.
Mike Lynch’s trial before Judge Charles Breyer (N.D. Cal.) lasted for almost three months. The jury deliberated for only two days before returning not-guilty verdicts on all charges against Lynch and his co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain, a former executive at Autonomy. It was a huge win for Morvillo, his Clifford Chance colleagues, and their co-counsel at Steptoe, led by Brian Heberlig and Reid Weingarten.
For a behind-the-scenes look at the trial, check out David Oscar Markus’s very recent interview of Morvillo on For the Defense. For Morvillo’s thoughts on the victory—including generous praise and thanks for his colleagues, co-counsel, and family—see his LinkedIn post (via The New York Post), which ends as follows:
And, finally, 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….
Lynch invited Chris Morvillo on a celebratory trip aboard the Bayesian, his 56-meter sailing yacht.1 The yacht set sail with 22 people aboard, 10 crew members and 12 passengers—including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares; Morvillo’s wife, jewelry designer Neda (Nassiri) Morvillo; and another member of Lynch’s defense team, Clifford Chance associate Ayla Ronald, and her partner Matthew Fletcher.
And then, on Monday, tragedy struck. Sometime after 4 a.m., while the Bayesian was anchored off the coast of Sicily, the vessel was caught in a freak storm and hit by a waterspout—essentially a tornado at sea. The yacht sank almost immediately. By the time a local fisherman arrived on the scene to help, all he could see were cushions and a few planks, floating on the surface of the water. The wreckage now sits 50 meters below the surface, complicating search and recovery efforts.
Fifteen people survived, including Angela Bacares, Ayla Ronald, and her partner. One remarkable story was that of Charlotte Golunski—a current colleague of Lynch at his post-Autonomy venture capital firm, Invoke Capital—and her one-year-old daughter:
After going into the water, Golunski lost her grip on her 1-year-old daughter, Sophie, when a wave smashed against them, taking the child out to sea…. The same wave returned the girl a short time later in what was described as something of a miracle.
In an interview with Italian newspaper la Repubblica, Golunski said that she briefly lost her daughter for about two seconds due to the intensity of the sea but was then able to retrieve the child.
“I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning,” Golunski told the newspaper, according to a translation.
One body—that of Thomas Recaldo, the Bayesian’s Canadian-born chef—was recovered. Six people remain missing: Mike Lynch and his daughter Hannah; Chris and Neda Morvillo; and Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy.
Gary Lincenberg of Bird Marella—who represented Lynch’s co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain—told Jack Newsham of Business Insider that Morvillo and his wife “are presumed to be passed away.” The terrible news about Lynch and Morvillo came shortly after the untimely death of Chamberlain, who was struck and killed by a car while jogging this past Saturday in the English village of Stretham. As Lincenberg told Newsham, “In the course of 48 hours, I can’t process what has happened, but both of our clients, as well as Chris and his wife, are gone.”
Clifford Chance didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider and Law360, but later issued a statement to The New York Times: “We are in shock and deeply saddened by this tragic incident.”
As of this writing, there has been no comment from the Morvillo family—a legal dynasty, especially here in the New York metropolitan area and in the white-collar world. Chris’s father was the late Robert Morvillo, a renowned criminal-defense lawyer who founded Morvillo Abramowitz, a leading white-collar boutique. Bob Morvillo had four sons—Christopher, Gregory, Scott, and Robert—and they all became lawyers. Greg was a partner at Orrick who now has his own firm, Morvillo PLLC; Scott, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn (E.D.N.Y.), is now a partner at Seyfarth Shaw; and Rob is the chief legal officer of Olo, a B2B software company focused on the restaurant sector that went public in 2021.
Returning to Chris Morvillo, I’ll leave you with the words of fellow defense lawyer David Oscar Markus—who, it’s hard to believe, had Morvillo on his podcast just last week: “For a guy coming off the win of his career and about to celebrate with his client and family, I cannot imagine a worse tragedy. I am sick about it. I am thinking about his two daughters and the rest of his family, his colleagues, and everyone else who knew Chris—a shining light in our white collar criminal defense world. He will be greatly missed.”
UPDATES:
8/20/2024, 2:38 p.m.: This post was revised to include information in this Times article, specifically, the statement issued by Clifford Chance and the names of Jonathan Bloomer’s wife and Ayla Ronald’s partner.
8/22/2024, 9:35 a.m.: Five bodies have been recovered, and the final missing person is a woman. Why the yacht sank remains unclear. Giovanni Costantino, CEO of the Italian Sea Group—which in 2022 bought the company, Perini, that made the Bayesian—told The Times, “Following all the proper procedures, that boat is unsinkable.” But if some hatches had been left open, he explained, the boat could have taken on water and sunk. As for what caused the capsizing, it was most likely either a waterspout or a fierce “down burst,” when air generated within a thunderstorm descends rapidly.
8/22/2024, 9:02 p.m.: The bodies of the Morvillos have been recovered, and the Morvillo family said in a statement that it was “completely devastated by the passing of Chris and Neda. Their passing is a tremendous loss.”
Some news accounts have described the Bayesian as chartered—which was possible, for $215,000 a week—but I think it’s fair to describe the yacht as Lynch’s. According to the BBC, the vessel’s registered owner was Revtom Ltd., an Isle of Man corporate entity whose sole owner was Lynch’s wife. And the name of the yacht refers to Bayesian theory—the subject of Lynch’s doctoral dissertation, as well as the foundation of the software that gave rise to his fortune.
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