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Count Otto Lambsdorff:COUNT OTTO Lambsdorff, who has died aged 82, was one of the most colourful and influential politicians in Bonn before German unification. He brought down chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s left-liberal coalition, thus enabling Helmut Kohl to take his place – and was then convicted of tax fraud in West Germany’s biggest corruption scandal.

Lambsdorff made his career in the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the minority liberal party that made and broke coalition governments. In 1966 the FDP was the only opposition in the Bundestag when the grand coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) took power under chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU). In 1969 the FDP under Walter Scheel helped the SPD to oust the CDU, enabling chancellor Willy Brandt (SPD) to lead a social-liberal coalition which won a famous victory in 1972, the year Lambsdorff was elected to the Bundestag.