Report Says E. German Secret Police Eyed Kohl Party’s Funds
The slush fund scandal spiraling around ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats took another strange twist Tuesday with a report that the East German secret police kept files on the party’s shady financial dealings as far back as 1976.
The Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel said it had found records of Stasi wiretaps of phone conversations by Kohl aides during the 1970s in which they spoke of funds in secret bank accounts.
Kohl, chancellor for 16 years until 1998 and leader of the conservative Christian Democrats for 25 years, has admitted breaking the law by accepting $1 million in undeclared campaign donations between 1993 and 1998.
But the files published by the paper included comments from Kohl aides suggesting that he knew of earlier illicit funding.
In a document describing an exchange between a top party financial officer, Uwe Luethje, and former party Treasurer Walther Leisler Kiep in July 1976, the paper said, Kiep allegedly told of a conversation with Kohl in which he said Kohl asked, “Have we put anything on the side anywhere?”
A spokesman for the government agency cataloging the East German espionage files said the documents published in Der Tagesspiegel were authentic.
In a statement issued by his lawyers, Kohl called the release of the files “the lowest point so far of the smear campaign” against him.
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