TIMESONLINE: Suspicious sleepovers, naked beach games and public holding of hands: is it true love for Günter Verheugen, the most powerful German in Brussels, or simply a creative new approach to shaping EU industrial strategy? And has he been bending the rules?
Mr Verheugen, Vice-President of the European Commission, says that everything is above board but pressure was piling on him last night to come clean about his relationship to his chief of staff – or to step down.
Photographs, taken furtively through a rose bush, show the stooped figure of the Commissioner entering the house of Petra Erler, his 48-year-old chef du cabinet. A second photograph shows him leaving the Brussels flat the next morning with Ms Erler. Mr Verheugen is taking legal action against Bunte, the glossy magazine that published both pictures this week.
The accusation against the Commissioner is that he promoted Ms Erler – a skilled bureaucrat and one of the few East Germans at the upper levels of the Commission – while conducting an affair with her. This he has been vehemently denying for the past nine months. “There was no relationship beyond friendship at the time of the promotion,” Mr Verheugen said in October. “And that remains the situation today.” Germany’s naked EU chief faces Wolfowitz charges over his ‘friend’ (more) By Roger Boyes
Mark Alexander
