Mike Lynch was holding 'celebration' after personal victory before tornado caused yacht to sink

Six, including Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, are still missing. The body of Ricardo Thomas, the chef onboard, was discovered within the 50-metre-deep wreck.

The Bayesian, an 184ft-luxury yacht, was carrying passengers as part of a planned celebration following Lynch’s recent personal success relating to his company.

He was cleared of all charges by a US jury in the high-profile fraud case related to the sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) for £8.6billion in 2011.

The guests were from Clifford Chance, the legal firm, and Invoke Capital, his own company, as well as his own family.

The father of a Clifford Chance lawyer who survived the tragedy said the trip had been planned to specially celebrate Lynch’s court victory.

Ayla Renold, 36, was one of the lawyers from the successful legal team who were invited to go on the yacht. Her father, Lin Ronald, said: “I have texted with my daughter and she hasn’t given me any updates about missing personnel or saved personnel. She has only said to me that there are deaths, and she and her partner are alive.”

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Fifteen of the 22 people aboard, which was made up of 12 guests and 10 crew, survived.

Unaccounted for are Lynch, his daughter Hannah who had just finished her A-Levels and was due to read English at Oxford, Christopher Morvillo, one of Lynch’s lawyers, and his wife Neda, Jonathan Bloomer, a chairman at Morgan Stanley International. Bloomer’s wife Judy is also missing, along with one other.

One of the survivors includes a mother who reported holding her one-year-old baby over the waves to save her. Both were saved when they were able to get onto a lifeboat with others.

Relaying the horrifying ordeal, Charlotte Golunski told la Repubblica: “I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning. 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.”

Local trawler captain Fabio Cefalu told Italian news agency EVN that he had seen lightning flashing across the bay and a “flare in the sea” just after 4am - forcing him to stay in the harbour.

Sam Jefferson, Sailing Today editor, said that if many doors were open due to hot weather, then the boat would have tipped over more easily.

“I imagine all the doors were open because it was hot, so there were enough hatches and doors open that it filled with water very quickly and sank like that,” he said.

“The reason it got pinned over so hard was because the mast is huge. It acted almost like a sail. [It] pushed the boat hard over on its side. (The boat) filled with water before it could right.”