Mike Lynch will leave a ‘hole that cannot be filled’, neighbour says as business world pays tribute
Mike Lynch’s neighbour of 15 years Ruth Leigh said he was a “fantastic neighbour” who “always went to the trouble of remembering your name, of asking after your partner or your children”
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One of Mike Lynch’s neighbours has described him as “generous, humble and full of integrity”, telling Sky News he will “leave a hole that cannot be filled” after his death was confirmed on Thursday.
Mr Lynch, 59, was confirmed dead by local authorities on Thursday after the Bayesian superyacht he was on with his wife and daughter sunk in the early hours of Monday.
Ruth Leigh lived next door to Mr Lynch and his wife Angela Bacares in Suffolk for 15 years.
She described them as “fantastic neighbours” and said the tech tycoon “never played on his position” and was “very friendly and down-to-earth” despite his fortune.
Mike Lynch’s neighbour: ‘Words fail me’
“Even though they were wealthy and influential people there was never any airs and graces,” Ms Leigh told Sky News.
“He always went to the trouble of remembering your name, of asking after your partner or your children. From the very start they were fantastic neighbours – very friendly and down-to-earth.
“He’d come from a very ordinary background and through his own brains and intellect, he’d made a really great company and come up with some incredible ground-breaking tech. He was always very moral. He gave to charity very generously and never played on his position.”
She described his death so soon after the end of his legal troubles as “the saddest thing I’ve ever hear
“The whole point about this trip to Italy was taking his friends and family to say thank you. That’s what makes it even more tragic,” she added.
“Losing somebody so kind, compassionate, and full of integrity must leave a hole that cannot be filled.”
Who is Mike Lynch?
Mr Lynch was extradited to the US and spent a year under house arrest in San Francisco before he was cleared of 15 charges of fraud earlier this summer by a jury.
Prosecutors claimed he deliberately overstated the value of Autonomy, the company he founded in 1996, when he sold it to Hewlett Packard in 2011. He always denied wrongdoing.
His former colleague has told Sky News he had a “brain the size of a planet” and was a “lovely man”.
David Tabizel co-founded Autonomy with Mr Lynch and the pair remained good friends. He described him as a “remarkable individual” and the “brightest man I’ve met in my life”.
“He was a lovely man,” he told Sky News. “He had a remarkable set of personality traits that we rarely see in Britain.
“Before him there was no British tech scene. He showed us we can be world-class.”
Mr Tabizel told of Mr Lynch’s “inner child”, that he “loved video games”, had a life-size train set in his garden, and how they animated a cartoon dog for their office, for which they both recorded the “barking noises”.
Commenting on his legal struggles, Mr Tabizel said he “never heard him lie or exaggerate” and he was “interested in the truth… in cutting through the noise”.
“For him to be accused of manipulating his profits. It was an extraordinary thing. It just wasn’t Mike.
“I loved that man and he should be celebrated as a hero.”
David Yelland, Mr Lynch’s former PR adviser and former editor of The Sun newspaper, has paid tribute to him in a post on X.
He said: “All those that knew and loved Mike are thinking of Angela and their surviving daughter Esme as they struggle to come to terms with such unimaginable loss.
“We have lost a man who was failed in life by his country and his peers when he needed them most – as he looked for help in the unjust US demand that he be extradited – and he has then suffered the most unfair and brutal of fates.”
Mr Yelland said he had spoken to Mr Lynch just before he set sail on the yacht.
He also described him as a “dreamer of dreams not just for himself but for all those that knew him, worked with him or invested with him”.
The entrepreneur had “exciting plans to contribute much more to the country he loved,” he added.
BP and now chairman of BeyondNetZero, said Mr Lynch was “the person who catalysed a breed of deep tech entrepreneurs in the UK”.
“His ideas and his personal vision were a powerful