No Side Income for German MPs

The speaker of the German parliament, Wolfgang Thierse, has urged that parliamentarians accepting money secretly, should be punished harder. In a TV Interview he said "Important is that there should be no hidden cash flow." Thierse added that it is "understandable and reasonable" that parliamentarians do have additional income in relation to their respective jobs, but "everything that is hidden is concealed lobbyism and that is wrong." Earlier, the leader of the opposition CDU Party, Angela Merkel, had supported the idea of the governing SPD-Green coalition to take legal action against politicians who were secretly receiving extra income from companies. Green party fraction leader Katrin Göring-Eckardt had said that all rules would only make sense when appropriate sanctions were levied against politicians with undisclosed income. What the sanctions would look like is still to be decided upon.