New Delhi: German billionaire Adolf Merckle, assailed by financial turmoil and struggling to salvage his business empire, has killed himself, his family said on Tuesday.
A family statement said that the desperate situation of Merckle's companies caused by the financial crisis, the uncertainties of the last few weeks and his powerlessness to act broke family entrepreneur, and he took his own life.
Prosecutors in the southern German town of Ulm, near Merckle's home, said the 74-year-old died when a train struck him late on Monday (January 5).
There was no sign anyone else was involved, they said.
"We are looking into this incident and whether anyone else was involved," Wolfgang Zieher said, spokesman for the Ulm prosecutor's office.
"All the information we have so far indicates this was not the case. A farewell letter to his family was found," Zieher said.
Merckle was ranked as the world's 94th richest person in 2008 according to Forbes magazine and his family controls a number of German companies including cement maker HeidelbergCement and generic drug company Ratiopharm, but its empire was rocked last year by wrong-way bets made on shares in carmaker Volkswagen.
Banking sources had told Reuters the family lost hundreds of millions of euros on investments, with losses of about 400 million euros ($539.4 million) on Volkswagen shares alone.
It has been in talks for weeks with banks to renegotiate loans.
Shares in HeidelbergCement were off 5 percent at 31.70 euros at 1547 GMT, having dropped to 29.16 euros earlier in the session.
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