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BRUSSELS - Photographs of the most senior German in the European Commission sunbathing naked with a senior female aide have dashed his hopes of becoming the European Union's foreign policy chief.
Gunther Verheugen, an EC vice-president, had been pressing for promotion but he has been enmeshed in scandal after the German newspaper Bild threatened to publish pictures of him and Petra Erler, the head of his private office, naked on a Lithuanian beach.
The married Verheugen, 62, promoted 48-year-old Erler to her present post but he has denied a relationship with her.
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