German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder stuck over the weekend by his embattled Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping, dismissing calls for the minister to resign over flights he took during his holiday with official aircraft.
Schroeder met with Scharping Sunday night, a top official for their Social Democrat (SPD) party said, after the chancellor had said Saturday about Scharping: "There is nothing that he can personally be reproached for. Let's not exaggerate. He should be treated correctly."
But the conservative opposition, which has called for Scharping to resign, remained on the offensive over the weekend with a drive to review all flights that Scharping has made with military planes.
Dietrich Austermann, a budgetary expert for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) said he wanted to see if Scharping had used military planes to visit his fiancée, the countess Kristina Pilati, at her home in Frankfurt, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper reported Monday.
Scharping had flown last Thursday from Skopje, where he was on an official visit to Macedonia, to the Spanish island of Mallorca in an army Challenger plane to join Pilati where they were on vacation, leaving two top parliamentarians of the conservative opposition Christian Union parties (CDU/CSU) stranded in Kosovo.
The two had been scheduled to use the plane to return to Germany.
Scharping then left Mallorca at dawn on Friday for Kosovo, before again returning to the island later the same day, all at taxpayers' expense -- BERLIN (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
