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...
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