A Kohl Day in Hell
Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor who oversaw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent German reunification, is the subject of a campaign finance scandal that stretches back over twenty years.
Leaders of Kohl's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party say that money was placed in Swiss bank accounts which acted as slush funds for CDU candidates. The money included reserves from the German Secret Service and from a trust set up during Konrad Adenauer's administration in the fifties. This trust was established to launder donations from businesses to right-of-center parties to help fight Communism.
While it is not clear how much money is involved in all, Kohl himself has been criticized by those within his own party for accepting over one million dollars in secret donations near the end of his sixteen-year tenure as Chancellor. Ludwig Stiegler, a ranking official of the majority party, the Social Democrats, claims that "the CDU has been financing its election campaigns for years through Mafia-style structures." "When the reality is as complicated as it is, all we can do is present it and try to assess it," said current CDU chairman Wolfgang Schauble, after hearing two days of testimony.
The major officials questioned in the matter were Horst Weyrauch, a tax advisor, Walther Leiser Kiep, a former CDU treasurer, and Uwe Luthje, who served in the party treasury. Weyrauch and Luthje admitted that funds were being deposited into the Swiss account when they began working for the party in 1971, while Kiep merely denied any involvement.
Another campaign finance scandal blighted Kohl and the CDU during the eighties. The "Flick Affair" involved the breaking of tax rules in order to increase the amount of possible contributions from the Flick industrial group as well as others. Kohl survived this scandal, proceeded to strengthen CDU funding rules, and then allegedly proceeded to break those new rules.
While Kohl's former aides have divulged details of the funding network, the 69-year-old Kohl himself has either chosen to remain silent or claimed poor memory regarding the sources of the illegal contributions. He claims that he is protecting "respectable" contributors, but his silence has given rise to a great deal of speculation over possible sources. Included are a wide variety ranging from German television mogul Leo Kirch to the late French President, Francois Mitterrand.
The Mitterrand angle involves the purchase of oil refineries and gas stations in former East German states after reunification by Elf, a French petroleum company. Kohl is said to have campaigned for the purchases in order to bolster employment in the impoverished regions, while the Elf company was to pour the equivalent of nearly five million dollars into CDU coffers. The costs of the factories were grossly inflated to allow for the payoffs. One of the prime figures in the operation was Pierre Lethier, who used a British dummy corporation to funnel the money from Elf to the CDU. Monsieur Lethier worked in the private office of the director of the DGSE, France's Secret Service division.
According to another theory, detailed in the magazine Der Spiegel, Weyrauch forged Paraguayan death certificates of fictional German emigrants, opened Swiss accounts with money gained through the Flick Affair, and then drew up wills leaving the money in the accounts to the CDU.
Kohl says that the affair is a "terrible stew of unproved allegations, slanders, and anonymous tip-offs quite probably with intelligence service manipulations." If the stew wins the prize ribbon of truth, the varnish on the legacy of the man who saw free Germany through the Cold War and on to Re-Unification will certainly be blemished.