Kohl denies benefiting from illegal donations

Kohl is at the center of a party funding investigation

BERLIN (Reuters) -- Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said Sunday that the criminal investigation into the funding scandal that has tarnished his reputation established he never profited personally from illegal donations.

"According to the investigations of the state prosecutors, I never personally enriched myself with one single mark," Kohl told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper in an interview.

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Kohl has seen his once formidable reputation as the man who reunified Germany crumble since he admitted that he accepted about $1 million in undeclared -- and thus illegal -- funds for his conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

"Prosecutors have also not been able to prove that any of the donations I collected were not used for the good of the CDU and their related associations," he said.

Kohl told the newspaper that his lawyers had received an initial 91-page legal report from prosecutors last week in which they said they had sufficient evidence to charge him for financially harming his party for failing to declare the funds.

The German parliament has fined the CDU 6.5 million marks ($3 million) for the donations accepted by Kohl, plus a further 41 million marks ($19 million) for money the party itself admitted concealing.

But Kohl noted he had collected around 8 million marks ($3.7 million) to help cover the fines, with some 700,000 marks ($324,000) coming out of his own pocket, which he said should more than compensate for the financial damage he caused the CDU.

The former chancellor said his lawyers doubted he would be prosecuted given the current state of the investigation. German media reported last month that prosecutors were considering dropping the probe if Kohl paid a fine of around 200,000 marks ($92,500).

Kohl, who was chancellor from 1982 to 1998, has continued to defy the law by refusing to identify his benefactors.

Karlheinz Schreiber, an international businessman whose secret cash payments to CDU officials have been a key focus of the scandal, said on Sunday that he was not one of them.

"Kohl has never received money from me," Schreiber told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Public prosecutors in the southern city of Augsburg said this week they wanted to haul Schreiber and the former CDU treasurer before the courts for charges related to the scandal.

Schreiber is currently living in Canada fighting extradition to his native Germany on separate charges of alleged tax evasion, fraud and bribery. He has denied the allegations.

Schreiber was targeted in a 1995 tax inquiry that eventually led to the revelations of the funding scandal. It prompted the resignation of CDU chairman Wolfgang Schaeuble, who admitted receiving 100,000 marks ($46,200) for the party from Schreiber.

The ruling center-left Social Democrats said Sunday that Kohl should not be allowed to address the 10th anniversary celebration of the unification of Germany that he oversaw on October 3, 1990, unless he named the donors.

"Nobody is questioning the historic achievement of Helmut Kohl," said SPD general secretary Franz Muentefering. "But if he continues to remain silent (about the donors), then I don't want to hear him on October 3."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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