OBITUARY: Mike Lynch, British tech trailblazer who died at sea after U.S. trial acquittal

Mike Lynch, the tech tycoon who died at sea, spent more than a decade building Britain’s biggest software company.

Mike Lynch, the tech tycoon who died when his luxury yacht sank off Sicily, spent more than a decade building Britain's biggest software company and almost as long again fighting charges he had inflated its value to secure a multi-billion-pound sale.

Lynch's body was retrieved on Thursday from the wreck of Monday's disaster, a senior Italian official said.

Lynch founded Autonomy in 1996 from his ground-breaking research at Cambridge University, and was lauded by shareholders, business leaders and politicians when he sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion 15 years later.

But in late 2012, HP stunned Wall Street and the City of London by saying it had discovered a massive accounting scandal. Lynch denied the charges.

HP wrote off $8.8 billion of value and triggered 12 years of legal battles in courtrooms from London to San Francisco.

Lynch was known for his formidable intelligence, turning his cutting-edge academic research into a multi-billion pound tech business and becoming known as Britain's Bill Gates.

He did not shy away from clashing with critics of his company - including on one occasion Oracle's Larry Ellison - and took a central role in building his defence.