[caribdis]

For the townsfolk of Porticello, the heat and clamour of those upsetting days in high summer are receding into memory. But a sense of disquiet remains. Not just at the loss of life, nor the feeling the wreck must be raised before they can move on, but that a better explanation for the tragedy is required.

Bartolomeo Lo Coco runs a bar that looks out across the Tyrrhenian Sea. Under a tall grey winter sky, he explains his suspicions, and those of some of his customers. “We think it was sabotage,” he says. “We don’t believe it was the crew or the boat or a climatic event. It was a conspiracy.”

The regulars of Tosto Chiosco are not alone. Lynch’s enormous wealth, his improbable victory over powerful forces in the US, his reported connections to MI5 and the National Security Agency through the software he sold them – all these factors have unleashed their own storm of speculation online. Perhaps the most tantalising occurence for such a theory was the sudden death of Lynch’s co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain, in a road accident while running near his home in Cambridgeshire on 17 August, the day before Bayesian sank: clear evidence of a conspiracy, they say, without explaining how anyone could coordinate a hit on a quiet country lane (where the driver stopped and answered police questions) with a surprise storm 1,500 miles away.

Antonina Imboccari, a local archeologist, confirms that many in the town “think there was something else behind it”.

“The place where we live has become famous for this tragedy,” she adds.
An industry steaming ahead

Plans to raise the wreck inch forward. In late November, a consortium of the yacht’s insurers, led by British Marine, presented eight salvage scenarios to the prosecutor’s office in Termini Imerese, with tentative talk of operations beginning in January. Whichever is chosen, it will be delicate, expensive work, likely to involve an attempt to rotate the boat nearly 90 degrees without disturbing the 18,000 litres of fuel still on board or dismantling the mast. It conjures the ghostly prospect of Bayesian sitting upright on the seabed with its defining feature, roughly the height of a seven-storey building, protruding out of the water by 22 metres. It is not known whether the rumoured waterproof safe has already been recovered.

Add to this the prospect of complex and potentially competing insurance claims. The yacht, and at least some of the lives on it, will have been heavily covered. Any conclusions as to the cause of the sinking, any findings of negligence, could prove critical in determining who pays what.
Jeff Bezo's yacht, The Koru, moored in Italy. Her masts stand at 70m tall, the largest sailing vessel in the world.
Jeff Bezo's yacht, The Koru, moored in Italy Credit: 2023 Robino Salvatore/Robino Salvatore

Elsewhere, the megayacht industry steams ahead. At the time of writing, shares in TISG, one of three Italian shipyards listed on the Borsa Italiana stock exchange, were only marginally down on the same date last year. Interest in sailing megayachts also seems robust, reflected in part by Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the 127-metre Koru from the Dutch shipbuilder Oceano, the biggest they have ever delivered.

Are such vessels safe? The Telegraph contacted the manufacturers of the world’s 10 biggest sailing yachts, Koru included, asking them to provide their stability booklet or, in lieu of that, simply the downflooding angle and angle of vanishing stability. None complied. There is no suggestion that any of these craft are badly built or in breach of regulations. But perhaps that is the point: neither was Bayesian. Following other maritime disasters, from Titanic to the Marchioness, rules and standards changed. Maybe, in time, they will again.