Düsseldorf flight affair

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The Düsseldorf flight affair was a corruption affair in North Rhine-Westphalia from 1998 onwards. Bank WestLB paid leading politicians from the SPD and CDU their private flight costs and deducted excessive tax bills. The reason for the inflated bills was that camouflaged prostitutes were taken away instead of stewardesses on some flights . In the context of this affair, in which allegations were made against Johannes Rau and Wolfgang Clement , Minister Heinz Schleusser resigned.

In the Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia one was investigating committee set up, in 2000 submitted an interim report. It mentioned 50 flights that Rau had undertaken between 1988 and 1997 at WestLB's expense. Rau assured that these flights had no private character, but had to correct his information on their number several times. Interior Minister Fritz Behrens, among other things, admitted in a response to a small question from CDU MP Peter Bensmann that a previous question had not been fully answered and that Rau took a BK 117 helicopter to Lichtenau on November 25, 1995had flown to congratulate the SPD MP Friedhelm Farthmann, who was hunting in the Holtenau district, on his birthday. Rau also had the costs of this action paid for from public funds. Rau's lawyers, among them Gernot Lehr , argued that the prime minister’s busy schedule cannot be exactly divided into whether he was head of government, party politician or generally as a public figure.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ A chronology: The flight affair from the beginning . In: Spiegel Online . January 26, 2000
  2. ^ Karl-Heinz Steinkühler & Thomas van Zütphen: Flight Affair: The godfather paid on time . In: Focus . No. 49, December 6, 1999
  3. ↑ Jürgen Roth : The Germany Clan. The unscrupulous network of politicians, top managers and the judiciary. Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt 2006, ISBN 3-8218-5613-0 , p. 38.
  4. ↑ NRW: Steinbrück is Schleusser's successor . Der Spiegel from February 2, 2000
  5. ^ Answer of the state government to the minor inquiry 1603 of the MP Peter Bensmann CDU, printed matter 12/4818 . File in the landtag.nrw.de portal , accessed on December 18, 2015
  6. ^ Augsburger Allgemeine : Review: Johannes Rau and the Düsseldorf flight affair . December 19, 2011
  7. ↑ Financial Times Deutschland : Personal loan: Wulff, his lawyer and the Rau affair ( Memento of January 8, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). December 21, 2011