A top HSBC banker has been found hanged in a £500-a-night hotel suite in Knightsbridge with a note by his side.

Hotel workers found Christen Schnor, 49, in his Jumeriah Carlton Tower Hotel suite last Wednesday. He is believed to have been naked and hanging by a belt in the wordrobe.

Police were not treating the death of Danish-born Mr Schnor as suspicious.

It is believed Mr Schnor's family had left for Denmark, where they had planned to spend Christmas, days earlier. He had rented a £390-a-day apartment for his wife Marianne and their two children in Lower Sloane Street.

Mr Schnor had become embroiled in a row with the landlords of the apartment in January. He claimed he did not get possession of the flat for a month after signing the two-year lease.

Mr Schnor worked at HSBC's Canary Wharf offices and earned a six-figure salary as the bank's head of insurance, with responsibility for the UK, Turkey, the Middle East and Malta.

A colleague said: "He did not seem under any pressure and was a quiet man." He joined the bank in June 2007. An HSBC spokesman said: "HSBC would like to express our deepest sadness over the loss of a respected colleague."

• 

  Sex, lies and the Stasi

  On this day in 1989 the Berlin Wall was finally breached, ending the reign of East Germany’s feared security service. Here Anne McElvoy, who spent much of the Eighties in the city, recalls her encounters with the spooks

  ---

• 

  The geeky-girl solo artists descending on the music scene

  Kookiness is what sells music these days and these opinionated artists have it in spades, says Jasmine Gardner

  ---

Top Gun Val Kilmer's arty mission to save the world

The Iceman cometh to the arts. Val Kilmer has been in London this week on what he terms "an art safari"

All stories