Germany's opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) were meeting in Berlin last night to consider their next move in a desperate attempt to control the scandal over illegal funding that has engulfed the party.
The meeting followed a sensational allegation on Saturday night that the late French president, Francois Mitterrand, had channelled millions of pounds to the party in the early 1990s.
According to a report on Germany's leading television news programme, Mr Mitterrand personally authorised a secret payment of u £12 million to the Christian Democrats in 1992.
The money, which is believed to be part of almost u£35 million paid in bribes by the French oil company, Elf Aquitaine, was sent to Germany through a network of secret service agents from both countries.
"This was not a bribe, the money was for the election campaign. The payment was in the interest of the state - for Europe," a close aide of the late French president is quoted as saying.
Swiss prosecutors are investigating alleged bribes paid by Elf Aquitaine, which is owned by the French government, in connection with the company's purchase of the Leuna oil refinery in eastern Germany in 1992.
The television report claimed that the former German chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, and Mr Mitterrand, both of whom backed the deal, entrusted the details of the secret negotiations to intelligence officers who met regularly in a Geneva hotel called Le Richmond.
There is no evidence that Dr Kohl knew of any payment made to his party in connection with the deal.
Dr Kohl, who resigned as party chairman last week, dismissed the report as pure invention and his spokesman insisted yesterday that the former chancellor and Mr Mitterrand never discussed money during talks about the oil refinery deal.
"The attempt through such slanderous allegations against Dr Kohl personally to arouse suspicions about his work to ensure the survival of the chemical industry in eastern Germany and to secure jobs in the region is just another low point in a character assassination campaign," he said.
But Swiss prosecutors said it was consistent with what they know about the affair already and files relating to the deal have vanished from the chancellery in Berlin and from government offices in the state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Dr Kohl's French connection adds a dramatic twist to the scandal and raises the question of whether cash paid by a foreign government influenced the outcome of Germany's federal election in 1994.
Dr Kohl won that election by the narrowest of margins and returned to parliament with a majority of just 10 seats.
Before last night's meeting of the party leadership, the CDU dismissed as a hoax a statement purporting to come from Dr Kohl promising to identify the donors of up to u£1 million to party funds.
The former chancellor told 4,000 cheering supporters in Bremen that he would never name the donors, whom he described as "highly respectable people".
Senior Christian Democrats sympathetic to Dr Kohl warned yesterday that unless the present leadership stops criticising the former chancellor, the party could split.
Dr Kohl's successor as party leader, Dr Wolfgang Schauble, has not ruled out taking legal action to force Dr Kohl to name the donors.
CDU member Mr Horst Eylmann, the former head of parliament's legal committee, called on the party to expel Dr Kohl.
"The party must isolate him," he told Welt am Sonntag. "He has not learned that the law stands above power."
The CDU will today release details of an audit of its finances carried out by the accountants Ernst and Young, which is likely to raise more questions than it answers.
To add to the CDU's discomfort, the family of Mr Wolfgang Hullen, a party official who was found dead in Berlin on Thursday, have demanded an autopsy to determine whether he did, in fact, commit suicide.
The family lawyer told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that there was no proof as yet that Mr Hullen took his own life and expressed concern about the disappearance of the dead man's mobile phone.