BERLIN: The head of the far-right Alternative for Germany, Joerg Meuthen, said on Tuesday his party was facing a hefty fine for allegedly violating campaign financing rules.
Meuthen told the daily Die Welt that a Swiss advertising agency had provided assistance valued at nearly 90,000 euros ($101,000) while he was running for a seat in the Baden-Wuerttemberg state parliament in 2016.
Under German law, campaign donations from non-EU countries are illegal. Switzerland, though linked to the EU through numerous treaties, is not a member of the bloc.
Meuthen, who is carrying the party's banner into European elections in May, insisted that he had not received money "either from (ad agency) Goal AG or its chief executive Alexander Segert".
However he received in-kind donations from the firm including around 27,000 euros in adverts, 17,000 euros worth of flyers, 41,000 euros in billboards and 5,000 in graphic layout work.
In exchange, Meuthen said, he signed a release form allowing Goal AG to use his "photograph and personal data for advertising purposes". Meuthen told Welt that an oversight office in the federal parliament had informed him that the AfD, Germany's biggest opposition party, would be fined more than 400,000 euros for his and another official's suspected campaign finance violations.
He said he would challenge the penalty on the grounds that the party did not break German law as the assistance was not a donation as such and came from EU citizens living in Switzerland.
It is not the first time that the anti-Islam, anti-immigration AfD has found itself in hot water over financing.