KARLHEINZ SCHREIBER was once Germany’s most effective bagman, handing over countless cases of cash from armaments companies to chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats (CDU).
When the donations came to light a decade ago, they tainted Dr Kohl’s reputation as chancellor of Germany unity and propelled Angela Merkel to power.
Yesterday, an ailing Dr Kohl welcomed his estranged protege and other political leaders to his Rhineland home of Ludwigsburg to celebrate his 80th birthday, while in the Bavarian city of Augsburg, the Schreiber (73) was sentenced to eight years in prison.
The former lobbyist was found guilty on six counts of tax evasion on undeclared income totalling €7.3 million – kickbacks he earned between 1993 and 2000 on €65 million worth of sales of helicopters to Canada, planes to Thailand and Canada, and tanks to Saudi Arabia.
The charge sheet was a reminder of how the wheeling and dealing of the former carpet dealer from rural Bavaria became Germany’s most influential greaser of wheels between industry and politics.
In a Swiss supermarket car park in 1991, he handed the CDU treasurer DM1 million in a suitcase. Current finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble accepted from him a suitcase filled with DM100,000 – something that eventually forced his resignation as CDU leader.
“We reckoned with a sentence of several years and he took the verdict with poise,” said Schreiber’s defence attorney, Jens Bosbach.
As the net closed on Schreiber in 1995, the ex-lobbyist skipped to Canada, where he has citizenship.
After a decade-long extradition battle, he returned to Germany last summer, promising to spill the beans on other politicians he had bribed.
In the end, Schreiber declined to testify and the trial was a sober affair, far from his promised “courtroom circus”.
Though Dr Kohl was stripped of his role as CDU honorary chairman, he has never been charged nor has he revealed to investigators the identity of his secret donors.
At his birthday party yesterday, he listened as former German president Roman Herzog recalled how he was also “a man who didn’t respect party donation laws”.
The former chancellor didn’t comment directly, instead he summed up his life in a speech as being “filled with many highs and very many lows”.
“It was a life with much responsibility and possibilities to change things,” he said. “If I may say so, it was a life with a purpose.”