Azerbaijan affair
Charges against two former members of the Bundestag
January 29, 2024, 4:55 p.m
Investigators accuse two former Union parliamentarians of bribery and bribery. They are said to have ensured a positive portrayal of Azerbaijan in their respective offices. According to the public prosecutor’s office, millions of dollars were involved. Both deny the allegations.
Charges have been brought against two former Union members of the Bundestag because of bribery allegations in the wake of the so-called Azerbaijan affair. The Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office announced that ex-CDU parliamentarian Axel Fischer from the Karlsruhe-Land constituency was suspected of bribery, and former CSU MP Eduard Lintner from Lower Franconia of bribery of elected officials. The aim of the payments was to influence decisions in favor of Azerbaijan in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
According to the investigators, Lintner, who sat in the Bundestag for 33 years and in the PACE until 2010, is said to have received “an amount several million through 19 foreign letterbox companies” through two companies by 2016. He is said to have forwarded some of these to other MPs who were supposed to influence decisions in Azerbaijan’s interests. According to investigators, Fischer, who was active as EPP group leader in PACE from 2010 to 2018, is said to have given positive speeches in the interests of Azerbaijan and forwarded confidential documents at an early stage. For this he is said to have received a bribe of 21,800 euros in 2016.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, the indictment concerns payments made since September 2014. Since then, influencing the activities of members of the parliamentary assemblies of international organizations such as PACE has been punishable in Germany.
The 79-year-old Lintner described the suspicion of bribery in Munich as “big nonsense”. After his time as a member of parliament, he worked as a lobbyist to ensure that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict region was assigned to Azerbaijan – a situation that, in his view, was “correct under international law.” The government there also paid money to his companies for this. But he didn’t bribe other members of parliament with it.
Fischer complains about prejudice
Azerbaijan and Armenia have been fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While the region, inhabited by a majority of Armenians, was able to break away from Baku in a bloody civil war in the 1990s with the help of Yerevan, the authoritarian-ruled Azerbaijan managed to take revenge in 2020. In the ceasefire agreement, Azerbaijan secured control over two-thirds of the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. But the ceasefire was fragile and Azerbaijan began another offensive in September 2023, and the defeated Karabakh Armenians surrendered just a day later.
The 57-year-old Fischer said that the allegations against him “are not true, they only serve to prejudge.” He was “so happy that after three years the public prosecutor’s office is finally presenting their papers to the court and stating what I am supposed to have done.” The procedure is “not only stressful and dangerous for my family and especially for my children, but it is also destroying my professional and social life.”
Both defendants are presumed innocent until convicted. According to its own information, the public prosecutor’s office has brought charges against two other defendants who are primarily accused of aiding and abetting – for example by making contact or processing payments. Another former member of the CDU/CSU, who was in the meantime under investigation for bribery, has now died. The Munich Higher Regional Court will decide whether there will be a trial after the indictment.
The chairwoman of Transparency Germany, Alexandra Herzog, described the indictment as a bang. “We are curious to see whether there will be a conviction given the porous law against bribery of members of parliament,” said Herzog. “Today’s news makes it clear once again that Germany must better arm itself against the danger of influence exerted by autocratically led states through strategic corruption.”