In a gripping interview just a week before the Bayesian hunting tragedy, the American lawyer who worked tirelessly to free “British Bill Gates” Mike Lynch from fraud charges said he would devote his career to the case.
Chris Morvillo, a former prosecutor and leading attorney at Clifford Chance, spoke with attorney and podcast host David Markus in an interview released days before a severe storm struck Lynch’s yacht as they celebrated the acquittal.
Morvillo admitted that Lynch’s fraud case “has been a constant presence in my life for the past 12 years.”
Morvillo also revealed the legal tricks he used to secure Lynch’s acquittal in the “complicated” case, and how prosecutors made an apparent mistake that allowed him to use his decades of experience against them.
Chris Morvillo (left) spoke with attorney and podcast host David Markus just a week before his disappearance, delving into Mike Lynch’s fraud trail, which he said influenced a significant portion of the rest of his life.
Morvillo was a prominent lawyer who earlier this year acquitted British billionaire Mike Lynch and was on Lynch’s yacht when it sank this week, leaving them and four others missing.
After learning of Morvillo’s disappearance in the yacht tragedy on Monday, Markus told DailyMail.com that he “has only just met Chris and is shocked and saddened by the news.”
“I know all of us in the criminal defense profession are thinking of him and his family right now,” Markus said. “Chris was a great guy –– smart, charming, personable. This is all so awful and sad.”
Lynch was accused by prosecutors in California of fraudulently inflating the value of his company, Autonomy, when it was sold to Hewlett-Packard.
In his interview with Markus, Morvillo said he was initially surprised to be included on the billionaire’s legal team. He said he was hired just minutes after he had inquired at his own firm about a role in the fraud case after seeing it in the news in 2012.
“I sent a note to the head of our litigation group in England saying, ‘I just saw this, is there anything we can do to help both sides?’ I was just looking for an entry point,” Morvillo said.
‘About 15 minutes later he wrote back that we had just been hired.’
Morvillo said that after he flew to London to meet Lynch, the massive fraud case quickly took over his daily life at his law firm.
“A lot of the rest of my life I was going back and forth between London and New York,” he continued. “It was a third of my career.”
Morvillo’s daughters Sophie and Sabrina were supposed to meet him in Italy
Morvillo (pictured with his wife Neda in 2018, who also disappeared in the yacht tragedy) said this month that the Lynch trial “has been a constant presence in my life for the past 12 years”
The family’s palatial home in Connecticut
According to Morvillo, the case against Lynch was particularly complicated because it had been dragging through the U.S. legal system for more than a decade before the trial began earlier this year.
He said prosecutors had in effect brought “two separate cases” against Lynch and his co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain.
“The evidence against Mr. Chamberlain and Mike was virtually unrelated,” he said. “So there were essentially two separate trials that were happening.
‘This created a confusing tangle of evidence, and we were never really sure which suspect it belonged to.’
While that added complexity to the process, Morvillo — a former assistant district attorney for the Southern District of New York — said it was the magnitude of the case that enabled him to get Lynch free.
“It gave us countless opportunities to say to the witnesses and the jury, ‘This had nothing to do with Mike Lynch, you never met Mike Lynch, you never spoke to Mike Lynch,’” he recalled.
“The first seven witnesses the government called… had never dealt with or spoken to Mike.”
The legal ploy, Morvillo said, was one of the key ways he secured Lynch’s freedom, resulting in the billionaire inviting his team of lawyers and family onto his doomed yacht in Sicily this week.
Mike Lynch’s massive Bayesian superyacht (pictured) capsized during a heavy thunderstorm on Monday morning
It comes after Italian authorities reported that divers (pictured on Wednesday) found the bodies of two missing passengers aboard the doomed superyacht
Italian authorities announced Wednesday that they had found the bodies of two missing passengers aboard the sunken superyacht.
Dive teams made the tragic discovery two days after Mike Lynch’s Bayesian ship sank after being hit by a “black swan” storm on Monday morning.
The body of at least one person was brought ashore shortly before 3pm local time and then placed in an ambulance in the port of Porticello.
The remains of the pair, whose names and gender have not yet been released, were reportedly found in the hull of the boat behind two mattresses. It is said to be of a “heavy-set man.”
The six guests are Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, Morgan Stanley boss Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy, and Morvillo and his wife Neda, a jewelry designer.