Frankfurt - Germany's former chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, has suggested that files relating to his receipt of illegal funds may have been destroyed by the new government after he left power, Denis Staunton reports. Giving evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into the funding scandal, Dr Kohl denied that the files, which amounted to the equivalent of more than one million pages, were deleted on his instructions after he lost the 1998 federal election.
He referred to reports that the disappearance of the files was discovered in October last year and suggested that the government had staged the parliamentary inquiry in an attempt to blacken his name.
The inquiry is attempting to establish whether illegal donations to Dr Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU) influenced the former chancellor's decisions during his 16 years in power. Dr Kohl reacted angrily yesterday to questions about the sale of an eastern German oil refinery to the French oil firm Elf Aquitaine, describing as "pure invention" reports that the late French president, Francois Mitterrand approved the payment of bribes to the CDU in connection with the deal.
The former chancellor repeated his refusal to identify the secret donors but two managers from Siemens denied a claim by a former CDU financial officer that the company gave the party £400,000 every year from 1984 until 1991.