Clemens Tönnies

Tönnies was born as the son of the butcher Klemens Tönnies and his wife Maria in Rheda, where he grew up with six siblings.

He took over the family company after his brother Bernd Tönnies died of a lung infection following a heart attack in 1994.

Price fixing

The Tönnies subsidiaries Böklunder, Plumrose and Karl Könecke Fleischwarenfabrik engaged in price fixing and were fined 128 million euros by the Federal Cartel Office. However, the antitrust agency was unable to obtain the fines, because Tönnies had transferred the companies' activities to the Zur Mühlen Group and then liquidated the subsidiaries due to pay fines. As a result of this, the German government closed this loophole in September 2016.

In August 2019, Tönnies spoke at the Tag des Handwerks Paderborn conference. He criticised the idea of raising certain taxes to fight climate change. In his talk, he suggested that Gerd Müller (CSU), at the time minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, "should finance power plants in Africa instead, and he will then send 20 large power plants to Africa every year. Then they will stop cutting down trees and they will stop producing children when it's dark, when we electrify them." This was widely criticised as racist, for instance by the German news magazine Der Spiegel.

Tax investigation

In 2012, German tax investigators searched Tönnies' office due to suspected tax evasion.

In January 2013, the German Federal Cartel Office fined Tönnies 90,000 euros (of the maximum 100,000) because he had omitted his shares in the Zur Mühlen Group when attempting to merge his company with the slaughterhouse company Tummel. The Cartel Office cited the shares as a main reason for rejecting the merger.

Tönnies obtained public funds from the German tax administration via CumEx deals. In these deals, he obtained refunds of taxes he had never paid.