Flick affair

The Flick Affair was a West German political scandal of the early 1980s relating to donations by the Flick company, a major German conglomerate, to various political parties—according to Flick manager Eberhard von Brauchitsch—"for the cultivation of the political landscape".Otto Graf Lambsdorff, then federal minister for economic affairs, was forced to resign in 1984 after being accused of accepting bribes from CEO Friedrich Karl Flick.

The affair was made public by the news magazine Der Spiegel who also gave the public access to documents and files that had been confiscated from the Flick company. It lastingly damaged public confidence in politics.

The Flick affair began in 1975 with a share trade where the Flick company sold shares worth 1.9 Billion Deutsche Mark from Daimler AG to the Deutsche Bank. In January of the following year, the Flick Company filed a tax exemption for this deal at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, which was approved by Minister Hans Friderichs (FDP) and later also by his successor and party colleague Otto Graf Lambsdorff.

Five years later, in 1981, the tax fraud investigator Klaus Förster after lengthy inquiries found evidence that there had been money transfers from the Flick company to all parties represented in the German Bundestag parliament. A cash book kept by the Flick company accountant Rudolph Diehl listed that next to other transfers, 250,000 Deutsche Mark was transferred to CSU chairman Franz Josef Strauss and 565,000 Deutsche Mark were transferred to CDU chairman Helmut Kohl, as well as payments to FDP and SPD politicians.

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