Leo Wagner

Leo Wagner (13 May 1919 – 8 November 2006) was a German politician (CSU). Between 1961 and his resignation from it, formally at the end of 1976, he served as a member of the West German Bundestag (parliament). For many years he was part of the inner political circle around the party leader, Franz Josef Strauß.^{[1][2][3] [4]}

During the 1970s Wagner became a focus of public interest on account of widespread suspicions involving the interaction between his personal habits and his public duties. Allegations became harder to refute following a trial in 1974/75, at the end of which Wagner was convicted of credit fraud. He received only a suspended sentence. However, during the trial it also emerged that in 1972 Wagner had received a loan of precisely 50,000 Marks from an undisclosed source. Both the amount and the date were significant, since it had become known that another Bundestag member, Julius Steiner had accepted a bribe of that amount from the East German security services in order to vote against his own party in a crucial “constructive confidence vote“ which the Brandt government won by just two votes, somewhat to the surprise of a number of well-informed political commentators and of the chancellor himself. Leo Wagner continued to deny that he had accepted a bribe from East German agents to vote against his own party and in support of the Brandt government, but by the time an 80 minute documentary film of the affair was produced by his grandson nearly half a century later, there was no longer any need to preface reports of the matter with the adjective "allegedly“.^[5][6]