YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. Just ahead of the German election, CDU MP Karin Strenz has been accused of doing paid lobbying work for the Azerbaijani dictatorship. Chancellor Angela Merkel was due to support Strenz on the campaign trail this week.

A German conservative parliamentarian has been caught up in a European-wide lobbying scandal involving the Azerbaijani regime, ARMENPRESS reports, citing DW news, German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Tuesday.

Karin Strenz, who represents Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the chancellor's home state of Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania, worked for Nuremberg-based consultancy Line M-Trade in 2014 and 2015, receiving between 7,500 euros and 15,000 euros ($9,000 - $18,000) in both years.

Line M-Trade is owned by Eduard Lintner, a former parliamentarian for the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU's Bavarian sister-party, who has been a lobbyist for Azerbaijan since his retirement as an MP in 2009.

As the SZ noted, Strenz has shown a noticeably friendly attitude to Azerbaijan in her political career.

Her personal website features a photograph of her standing alongside President Ilham Alyev, and in 2015 she was the only German delegate on the European Council to vote against a resolution calling on the country to release political prisoners.

An investigation published in a number of European newspapers on September 4 showed that another Lintner-owned concern, the Berlin-based lobby group Society for Promoting German-Azerbaijani Relations (GEFDAB), received a total of 819,500 euros between 2012 to 2014 from offshore companies run by Azerbaijan's ruling Aliyev family.

The payments to Lintner were part of the "Azerbaijan Laundromat," a European-wide money-laundering and lobbying scandal revealed earlier this month by a collection of newspapers together with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). It showed that the Azerbaijani government invested $2.9 billion between 2012 and 2014 into gaining influence with lawmakers throughout the European Union, using shell companies in Britain to funnel the money.

Lintner's work on behalf of Azerbaijan had already been publically questioned: particularly a payment of 61,000 euros that GEFDAB received in 2013, two weeks after Lintner led a German delegation to observe the Azerbaijani presidential election. Lintner's verdict was that the vote met "German standards," even though official observers found "significant problems" with President Aliyev's victory.

But Tuesday's revelation is the first time that a serving German MP, Strenz, has been caught up in the scandal, and the timing is embarrassing for Merkel, as she campaigned alongside Strenz in the coastal town of Wismar on the same day.