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A prominent New York lawyer is one of six missing passengers on a yacht that sank off the coast of Italy while traveling with his longtime client, British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, just weeks after helping him avoid conviction in a 12-year legal battle.
Divers were still searching Tuesday for defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Christopher Moviello, a partner at Clifford Chance, and his wife, Neda, as well as Lynch and three other missing passengers. Fifteen people are known to have survived.
The British-flagged luxury superyacht, the 56-meter (184-foot) Bayesian, with 22 people on board, was anchored outside the port of Porticello in Sicily when it was caught in a fierce storm and sank at dawn on Monday.
Ayla Ronald, a senior partner at Clifford Chance in London, and her partners are among the survivors, the London-based global law firm said in a statement Tuesday. Ronald also served as Lynch’s lawyer, according to a profile on the firm’s website.
A spokesman for Clifford Chance said: “We are shocked and saddened by this tragic incident.”
Movillo, 59, was Lynch’s lead lawyer until he was acquitted in June after a three-month fraud trial in San Francisco stemming from Hewlett-Packard’s failed bid for Lynch’s software company, Autonomy. Movillo has been representing the British entrepreneur since 2012.
He is the son of Robert Morvillo, who was considered one of New York’s most savvy criminal defense attorneys before his death in 2011. Morvillo Jr. was also a prominent white-collar defense attorney who served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan, assisting in the criminal investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks.
In 2011, Lynch sold Autonomy to HP for $11 billion, but the deal fell through after the US tech giant accused him of fraud.
This summer, Movillo’s bold move to have Lynch on the stand to question his client in his U.S. criminal trial paid off when a jury acquitted him of any wrongdoing. Lynch testified that he had no role in what prosecutors called Autonomy’s massive accounting fraud.
In a podcast interview with white-collar criminal defense attorney David Oscar Markus published last week, Movillo said he first joined Lynch’s legal team in November 2012, just after HP wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion.
“It covers a third of my career,” Morvillo said of his work for Lynch.
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