Germany: Charges pressed in Schumacher family blackmail case
September 25, 2024
The public prosecutor's office in the German city of Wuppertal said on Wednesday that it had filed a criminal case in its investigation of the alleged blackmail of F1 star Michael Schumacher's family.
"The investigations are now complete," chief prosecutor Wolf-Tilman Baumert said. The arrests and the investigation were first announced in June.
Schumacher's family, led by his wife Corinna, handle the seven-time F1 World Champion's affairs ever since his serious and debilitating fall while skiing in December 2013.
What's the case about?
Three men face charges as part of the probe: a former member of the Schumachers' security detail, and a father and son without known connections to the family.
The former Schumacher employee is accused of making private material available to the other two men in exchange for a "five-figure" sum of money. The 53-year-old is thought to have been tasked, among other things, with digitizing old photos and videos on the family's behalf. At his arraignment hearing, he acknowledged being the source of the leak.
The father and son, aged 53 and 30 and both based in Wuppertal, are then accused of trying to use this data to blackmail the Schumachers.
Investigators say the accused had two hard drives and four USB-sticks containing private photos and videos from the family collection, some taken before and some after Schumacher's 2013 skiing accident.
They made repeated phone calls demanding €15 million (roughly $17 million) in exchange for returning the material. In the case of non-payment, they allegedly threatened to publish the data on the dark web.
A family employee in Switzerland had asked first for proof that the blackmailers possessed what they claimed to. This was sent via an email that was not traceable. But investigators were instead able to trace the calls to the Schumachers to a phone in nearby Kassel, which eventually led them to the three suspects.
German investigators have made no comments as to the nature of the material used.
What comes next?
The 53-year-old man from Wuppertal is accused of a particularly serious case of attempted blackmail, his son is accused of being an accomplice to it.
The former employee of the Schumachers, from nearby Wülfrath, is also accused of being an accessory to attempted blackmail and of violations of personal privacy laws.
Prosecutors have applied to extend the pre-trial detention of the two older men until a trial begins. The younger man is not in custody at present.
The decision on whether or not a case will be tried now rests with Wuppertal's district court, or Amtsgericht.
The case is not the first instance of attempted blackmail of the Schumachers. In 2017, a 25-year-old man was given a suspended sentence of 21 months in prison for demanding €900,000 euros from Corinna Schumacher. That case was tried in Reutlingen in southwestern Germany.
msh/wd (AFP, dpa, SID)