CDU activists fear £4m slush fund may be tip of iceberg

Germany's opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was bracing itself last night for damaging new revelations about illegal donations to the party. Leading figures have admitted that they do not know the origin of up to £4 million received between 1989 and 1993.

A day after the former chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, was forced to step down as honorary chairman, party activists were demoralised and fearful that the misdeeds already revealed may represent no more than the tip of a sleazy iceberg.

A parliamentary inquiry into Dr Kohl's network of secret accounts opens in Berlin today, and the CDU will publish revised accounts at the weekend. Mr Christian Wulff, a vice-president of the party, indicated yesterday that the auditors had discovered at least DM9 million (£3.7 million) from unidentified donors.

Meanwhile the CDU prime minister of Hesse, Mr Roland Koch, admitted that illegal donations to the party in his state were higher than acknowledged.

The Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, his Social Democrats (SPD) and their coalition partners in the Greens have called for a rerun of last year's state election in Hesse on the grounds that Mr Koch's successful campaign was financed illegally.

Dr Kohl's resignation as honorary chairman marked the end of a power struggle between the former chancellor and his successor as party leader, Dr Wolfgang Schauble.

Dr Schauble, whose doctoral thesis at Freiburg University was about the importance of independence and transparency for auditors, has won the support of almost the entire leadership for his demand that Dr Kohl should identify the anonymous donors who gave him £1 million in cash between 1993 and 1998.

But Dr Schauble is himself tainted by the scandal and has admitted that he misled the Bundestag over a donation he received from Mr Karl-Heinz Schreiber, a fugitive arms dealer whose gifts to the CDU sparked the present scandal.

"Schauble won a vote of confidence. However, everyone who supports him now knows that he will find it difficult to embody the CDU's future. He was Kohl's close colleague and ultimately his crown prince. He will have to step down if the party is to begin again," the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote yesterday.

Almost two out of three Germans believe that Dr Schauble ought to have resigned as leader yesterday, according to a poll to be published today in the weekly paper Die Woche.

The same poll shows that support for the CDU has fallen by 4 per cent to 29 per cent since last week, while Mr Schroder's SPD has leapt to 44 per cent. The liberal Free Democrats (FDP) also appear to have benefited from the scandal; their support has risen by 3 percentage points to 8 per cent.

Among the most worrying questions facing the CDU is that of how much the scandal will cost the party financially. According to the law governing party funding, illegal donations must be returned and the party must pay a fine equivalent to twice the amount of each donation.

But the president of the Bundestag, Mr Wolfgang Thierse, can impose greater sanctions.

One option would be to demand the return of all matching funds paid by the state in respect of donations to the party. This would mean a fine equivalent to half of all donations the party has received during the past 10 years, a sum estimated at around £160 million.

"Nobody has an interest in ruining this great party," Mr Thierse said recently.

Christian Democrats are hoping that Mr Thierse, who is a Social Democrat, will heed his own words.