Kohl Withheld Arms Deal Data, Party Finance Investigators Told

Helmut Kohl’s government withheld records about an arms deal under scrutiny for possible kickbacks, a German prosecutor told parliamentary investigators Thursday.

The contract for tank sales to Saudi Arabia is among several deals being examined by a parliamentary committee set up to determine whether political donations influenced decisions under Kohl, whose 16-year tenure as Germany’s chancellor ended in 1998.

Winfried Maier, a prosecutor in the southern city of Augsburg, testified to the panel that Kohl’s government rejected his 1997 request for minutes of the Federal Security Council, a Cabinet committee that approved the tank sale. Maier said the government told him that the material was confidential.

The tank sale is an element in the campaign finance scandal that has engulfed the Kohl’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, since the former chancellor admitted in December that he accepted as much as $1 million in unrecorded donations in the 1990s.

His refusal to name donors has fed speculation that the funds prompted favors by his government--something Kohl has denied.

The scandal has grown to include covert accounts at the federal and state levels, large sums of campaign money from unexplained sources and millions in fines for the party for false financial reports.

The arms sale emerged in November as a possible link, with reports that businessman Karlheinz Schreiber gave $500,000 in cash to a Kohl aide in 1991, allegedly in connection with the tanks.

In another business deal that has come under question, Volker Neumann, leader of the parliamentary inquiry, asserted Thursday that Kohl must have known that crucial files vanished while he was in office. The files concerned the privatization of the Leuna oil refinery in the former East Germany.