The initial reports were bizarre. On Friday, Tommaso Bertuccelli, a lawyer who works with The Italian Sea Group (TISG), the builder of the superyacht Bayesian that sank at anchor in August off Sicily, killing Mike Lynch and six other passengers, filed a €222 million ($244 million) lawsuit against Lynch’s widow and crewmembers of the ship, citing reputational damage.

Immediately after the sinking,  Giovanni Costantino, CEO of TISG, described the vessel as “unsinkable” and claimed that a series of “indescribable, unreasonable errors” by the crew led to the shipwreck.

The lawsuit filed on Friday by Bertuccelli alleges that TISG has already lost business due to the sinking, including a well-known fashion house that retracted plans to launch its branding on the company’s yachts.

After the first reports of the lawsuit, TISG said it did not authorize the suit and promptly instructed lawyers to remove the case on Saturday afternoon.

A representative for TISG told Fortune: “The Italian Sea Group S.p.A. clarifies to have instructed its lawyers – who on September 20, 2024 had filed at the Termini Imerese Court the writ of summons mentioned in the news in recent days – to withdraw the said summons on September 21, 2024, at 2.01 pm by certified email. TISG also says it fired Bertuccelli.

A source told MailOnline: ‘”The first anything we knew about this was when the story emerged in Italian media and it was then picked up by international publications.

“There is absolutely no truth in the story that TISG has filed a lawsuit. The lawyer in question, who has worked with us for eight years acted completely off his own back.

“He had been instructed to look into the case legally on behalf of TISG but that is it, for some reason he decided to file case which hadn’t even been seen, agreed and signed by the board. He has now been sacked and is no longer working for us.”