Sinking of Yacht off Sicilian Coast

[Cesarina]

This is of course an absolutely tragic event.
I'm feeling a bit mean by saying this.........but why is it the headline topic on BBC news?
I genuinely feel sorry for those involved, but don't understand why it's the dominant news story?

Oh I didn’t know this.

Yes, the titanic submersible was the comparison that occurred to me, too. I suppose we are all suckers for an exciting story, but they could at least have the decency to wait until they can monetise this via a netflix documentary, rather than pushing more important stories off the news.

Do people really think that Hewlett-Packard, after losing an expensive and long running court case, decided to kill Lynch, his ex VP of finance, one of his many lawyers (the english, not American one) and one of the many witnesses?

For no possible financial benefit to the company ?

Really?

Apparently so @SheilaFentiman, it’s crazy. Would make more sense if they did it years ago before the court ruling.

And to do so by magicking up a freak storm?!

So sad especially the daughter tragic..

Another good reason to avoid boats plus I get horribly sea sick.

And to do so by magicking up a freak storm?!

Yep & how did they get a local to run someone over & stay at the scene?

Still wouldn’t have made sense, as it’s not like Lynch would have had life insurance in HP’s favour at that point.

Prince Philip driving the white Fiat had more legs as a conspiracy theory than HP doing something.

And people questioning why it’s news, look at how many threads there have been about it. It’s an interesting and tragic story involving high profile, rich people from a few different countries.

4 days earlier.

People have died

@SheilaFentiman I mean I don’t think it makes actual sense just more sense than doing it post acquittal years later. I’m sure it’s been £££ in legal fees for HP.

Got it :-)

I dunno but did you know his business partner died same weekend unrelated accident got killed by a car in Cambridge. Something seems a bit odd

For goodness sake, humans cannot create a freak waterspout out of nowhere. I feel like people are taking the ridiculous cloud seeding conspiracy I see on Twitter and running with it.

The guy who was hit by a car was hit by a local woman who stopped at the scene and was by all accounts absolutely devastated. I used to live locally so am in local Facebook groups, and apparently there's no pavement on that stretch so people run in the road - idiotic thing to do.

It looks like the mast of the boat was too high, which contributed to it going down so quickly. I do wonder if there's an element of rich man/biggest boat syndrome, but nothing more.

I dunno but did you know his business partner died same weekend unrelated accident got killed by a car in Cambridge. Something seems a bit odd

It’s not odd, it’s a tragic coincidence. These things do happen.

Yes, I did. I put it in the post (Stephen Chamberlain was the ex VP of finance)

@Daltonbear1 do you know this?

“The guy who was hit by a car was hit by a local woman who stopped at the scene and was by all accounts absolutely devastated”

Do you think the CCTV footage of the yacht in the storm just before it sank is fake?

It’s like the Nicola Bully threads where people were desperate for it to be a crazed murder & refused to believe the most obvious scenario.

If Chamberlain had been killed two months ago in a car accident, or in two months time, would you even have made a link? I doubt it.

If there were to be a conspiracy (cui bono, though?) to kill them both, anyone with the wherewithal to scupper a yacht (and no sign of foul play yet) and summon a waterspout as a cover up can probably think of 20 better ways to do it.

But according to an expert on the radio said that this should not have happened to this particularly yacht

But according to an expert on the radio said that this should not have happened to this particularly yacht

The Twin Towers weren’t meant to collapse & the Titanic wasn’t meant to sink. Experts are not always correct….

And a man made water spout? Who would have been able to organise that at the exact spot that the yacht was?

Much more likely that some kind of human action or inaction has turned what would usually be a survivable incident into a fatal one. At the risk of bringing out the tin foil crazies like Princess Diana not wearing a seatbelt while her bodyguard was

Storms blow up quickly, and the yacht was so large that it would be usual to anchor and not go into port. But being at anchor in a storm is not a good idea…. The captain survived and his testimony will be interesting.

@SnapdragonToadflax lots of people run in the road. We used to live in the countryside in Oxfordshire and there were no pavements at all in our village or any of the surrounding ones. Everyone ran and walked in the road so it's not unusual.

I was interested in the story - HP won most of its case in London and then Mike Lynch was pursued in the US in a case that no one thought he had a chance of winning. These are the odds he was up against

Data from Pew Research Center shows that in 2022, only 290 of 71,954 defendants in federal criminal cases – 0.4 per cent – were acquitted at trial, while 1,379 were convicted; of the rest, nine out of ten pleaded guilty.

But he won and this trip on the boat was a celebration for friends, family and colleagues who supported him.

So yes it's an interesting news story all round but terribly tragic