GERMANY:Gabriele Verheugen, wife of EU commissioner Günter Verheugen, has told a German magazine she has left her husband after 20 years of marriage a year after he denied having an affair with his top adviser, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin.
Last October German magazine Focuspublished pictures of Mr Verheugen and Petra Erler, his chef de cabinet, holding hands while on holiday in Lithuania. The magazine said it also had pictures of the couple sunbathing on a nudist beach but decided not to publish them.
The pictures and allegations that the two were having an affair sparked a discussion in Brussels and Berlin about whether personal circumstances played a role in the appointment of Ms Erler to her position in April 2006.
Mr Verheugen, a German Social Democrat who holds the industry portfolio, dismissed those allegations as "sheer libel". Ms Erler's suitability for the position were above question, he said, adding that the two shared a friendship and nothing more, "at the time of the appointment and at present". Yesterday Mrs Verheugen said to gossip magazine Bunte: "Yes, it's true, I am separated from my husband." Mr Verheugen said: "The state of my marriage is a purely personal matter."
One of the couple's last public appearances was at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth last July. Weeks later, Germany's Bildnewspaper showed photos which it said showed Mr Verheugen arriving at Ms Erler's apartment and leaving the following morning. Yesterday Mr Verheugen said such photos "prove nothing other than the fact of intensive spying".
Commission president José Manuel Barosso said he stood by his position from last autumn, that the situation posed no conflict of interest. German Christian Democrat MEP Ingeborg Grässle disagreed, telling Bunte: "If a chef de cabinet is as close to her commissioner as Ms Erler is, she can no longer carry out the control function assigned to her." There has been speculation about a link between the publication of the original pictures and Mr Verheugen's complaint days earlier that EU officials had too much power.
"There is a permanent struggle for power between the commissioners and their high-ranking officials," Mr Verheugen had said. "Civil servants [ have] such power that . . . the most important political task of the 25 commissioners is controlling this apparatus."