Kohl Questioned About Party Funds

With a swaggering contempt for his accusers, former chancellor Helmut Kohl appeared Thursday before a parliamentary committee investigating financial misdeeds under his rule and said he was a victim of slander.

In hours of rambling testimony and subsequent exchanges with journalists, Kohl, who was chancellor from 1982 to 1998, said the parliamentary investigation amounted to “an attempt to drag 16 good years through the mud.”

His stance was consistent with the defiance he has shown since his admission last December that he had taken about $1 million in undeclared, and therefore illicit, payments from donors and used the money to bolster his Christian Democratic party in the formerly communist eastern Germany.

Kohl, who took the money between 1993 and 1998, has refused to name the donors, and on Thursday he said that he had “no intention of naming them.”