Death of German finance official linked to virus crisis
The state finance minister of Germany’s Hesse region has been found dead.
Authorities said he appears to have killed himself and the state’s governor suggested Sunday that he was in despair over the fallout from the coronavirus crisis.
The body of Thomas Schaefer, a 54-year-old member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, was found Saturday on railway tracks at Hochheim, near Frankfurt.
Police and prosecutors said that factors including questioning of witnesses and their own observations at the scene led them to conclude that Schaefer killed himself.
State governor Volker Bouffier linked Schaefer’s death to the Coronavirus pandemic.
“We are in shock, we are in disbelief and, above all, we are immensely sad,” Mr Bouffier said in a recorded statement.
Hesse is home to Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt, where major lenders like Deutsche Bank have their headquarters.
Visibly shaken, Mr Bouffier said Mr Schaefer had been Hesse’s finance chief for 10 years, and had been working “day and night” to help companies and workers deal with the economic impact of the pandemic.
Bouffier said Schaefer was worried about “whether it would be possible to succeed in fulfilling the population’s huge expectations, particularly of financial help.”
“I have to assume that these worries overwhelmed him,” Bouffier said. “He apparently couldn’t find a way out. He was in despair and left us.”