Corona in the slaughterhouse: The butcher and the disease

Saturday morning at the meat counter of one of Frankfurt's super market. A customer leans over the Display, asking timidly to the origin of the goods. These critical views, the seller has seen behind the counter in the past few days, obviously more – so prompt, as he gives the answer: "don't worry, is not of Tönnies!"

Sebastian Balzter

editor in the economy of the Frankfurt General Sunday newspaper.

To Clemens Tönnies, Europe's largest meat suppliers, at the same time since almost twenty years the strong man in the football Bundesliga club Schalke 04 and one of the most prominent business magnates in the country, divorce has long been the ghosts. Some celebrate him as a brilliant businessman, is looking forward to his pithy style, in his East Westphalian thick skull. The demonize other people accuse him of animal welfare despisers, and Martinet, him racism and revile its products as immoral-produced cheap meat. He'll keep to the rules and deliver just what the majority of customers, in opposition to Tönnies such criticism, so far, always cool.

shows The scene from the supermarket, how far into the Off the to the multi-millionaire ascended butcher's son from the small town of Rheda-Wiedenbrück in the district of Gütersloh over the years has maneuvered. From the policy, where Tönnies used to have influential friends, he is now biting criticism; many Schalke-Fans make him to be the sporting and financial decline of the club is responsible, has not won in the League for 15 Games; his nephew, Robert Tönnies, which holds half of the shares in the company, calls on him to resign as head of the company.