Word: barzell
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...victims has been growing steadily. In June, Kohl's Economics Minister, Otto Graf Lambsdorff, resigned amid accusations that he had accepted $50,000 in 1979 and 1980 in exchange for allowing the Flick firm generous tax writeoffs. Lambsdorff faces trial next January on criminal charges. In October, Rainer Barzel, president of the Bundestag and a senior member of Kohl's Christian Democratic Union, also stepped down. The weekly Der Spiegel published a Bonn prosecutor's report that the Flick company had paid more than $700,000 to a Frankfurt law firm, and that the firm had paid...
...Rainer Barzel, 60, president of the Bundestag and the nation's second-highest official after Chancellor Helmut Kohl, resigned last week in a scandal that has seriously shaken the two-year-old Kohl government. Barzel was named as the recipient of 1.7 million deutsche marks (now worth more than $700,000) from Friedrich Flick Industrieverwaltung, West Germany's largest private industrial firm. The Bundestag leader thus be came the latest victim in the Flick affair, an influence-peddling scandal that has claimed 16 public figures in two years...
According to Der Spiegel, which broke the story, a Bonn prosecutor's findings have suggested that Barzel may have received the money through his Frankfurt law office. Barzel was allegedly paid off in exchange for giving up the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union in 1973 in favor of Flick's choice for the post, Kohl. Though Barzel denied any wrongdoing and no charges have been filed, he agreed to resign after a half-hour private chat with Kohl. The Chancellor himself is scheduled to appear before a parliamentary investigating committee next week to explain reported expenditures...
...Under Article 67 of West Germany's constitutional Basic Law, a simple majority of deputies in the 497-seat Bundestag can remove the Chancellor provided that they "constructively" designate a successor. As Christian Democratic leader in 1972, Rainer Barzel tried and failed to use the provision to topple Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt...
...Christian Democratic Leader Rainer Barzel, tempted by the government's narrow margin of seats, sought to topple Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt. He failed by two votes, and in the 1972 national election the Christian Democrats suffered significant losses...