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Germany's CDU may sue Kohl as funding scandal deepens

BERLIN: Germany's Christian Democrat opposition might sue its longtime leader Helmut Kohl to make him reveal the source of secret slush funds that have dragged the party into its worst scandal, a party official said.

The woes of a party already tearing itself apart deepened on Thursday when a senior party aide hanged himself and police said his suicide note had led them to open a fraud investigation.

At the heart of the scandal is Kohl's forced admission that he received $1 million in undeclared gifts for the party during his 16 years as chancellor, in contravention of electoral law.

Party leaders, many of them his proteges, desperately want him to name the donors as a way of shaking off the scandal, and their pressure has forced him to quit as honorary CDU chairman.

Late on Thursday former party general secretary Heiner Geissler said on national ZDF television that the CDU was considering launching a civil suit because the crisis could not be overcome until Kohl named names.

"As former party chairman he has a duty to provide the information," Geissler said.

Kohl has flatly denied ever selling favours but says he promised his secret donors never to reveal their identity. He has blasted pressure exerted on him by CDU colleagues and the German media as "a witch-hunt".

He again brushed off journalists as he left his Berlin home on Friday morning. "You're here every morning looking for sensation. One would hope a minimum standard of journalism is possible. But I don't see it here," Kohl said.

German newspapers said Kohl's placing of personal vows above the law banning slush funds was a menace to German democracy.

"It's time to turn our attention to the fact that the crisis of the CDU could mushroom into a crisis of party democracy," the mainstream conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine said on Friday.

"Events are now somersaulting over each other. A CDU official killed himself. This wasn't necessarily linked to the donations affair. But it affected the CDU in an uncanny way. And not only them," said Berlin's Tagespiegel daily.

Berlin prosecutor Stefan Wolf said he had begun an investigation "based on a preliminary suspicion of breach of trust" against Wolfgang Huellen, the 49-year-old head of the parliamentary CDU's finance and budget unit, who was found dead in his Berlin apartment earlier in the day.

The CDU said Huellen's death was a personal matter unconnected to the scandal, but ZDF said the suicide message had references that might connect him to misuse of party funds.

Commentators said Huellen's suicide added a new and tragic element to the scandal, regardless of the circumstances.

"The party says the motives for the suicide were personal. But at the same time, Wolfgang Huellen chose to commit suicide at the peak of the finance affair," the daily Die Welt, a traditional CDU supporter, said in an editorial.

It said the scandal was no longer only eating away at the party itself, but also at its members.

Kohl's successor as CDU leader, Wolfgang Schaeuble -- who has himself admitted to receiving donations that were not properly declared -- apologised to parliament for what seem to be systematic violations of party financing laws.

The CDU is struggling to explain the origin or the handling of at least $5 million worth of funds, and Schaeuble admitted it was "stuck right in the middle of the donations mess".

Kohl is under criminal investigation for suspected breach of trust, punishable in Germany by up to five years in prison.

Revered until December as one of Europe's leading statesmen and an architect of German unification, he now finds himself dubbed "Don Kohleone", mafia-style, by German media.

The party which Kohl ran for 25 years, 16 of them as chancellor, has sunk to a historic low in polls.

A parliamentary committee of inquiry is to question Kohl and a galaxy of prominent politicians who served under him in an attempt to establish whether any of the secret funds were used to buy political favours.-Reuters