AUSTIN -- Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick is facing an ethics complaint over campaign payments and state health insurance benefits he has provided for his daughter, a former lobbyist whom he employs as a political consultant.

Filed this week by Houston-area Democratic activist John Cobarruvias, the complaint alleges that Craddick has run afoul of laws designed to prevent politicians and their families from living off campaign accounts. Craddick's lawyer, Ed Shack, denied that the speaker had violated any ethics provisions.

Tom Craddick has paid Christi Craddick about $12,000 a month for her consultant work, for a total of more than $600,000 since 2003, records show. The powerful lawmaker also helped craft a law in 1997 that made his adult daughter eligible for lifetime state health insurance as long as she doesn't marry.

That's the rub, Cobarruvias says: Christi Craddick can receive a campaign salary only if she's not the speaker's dependent child. But she can only get the state health insurance by being declared his adult dependent.

"He can't have it both ways," said Cobarruvias.

Craddick spokeswoman Alexis DeLee called the complaint "groundless" but declined to provide any information about Christi Craddick's health insurance or even to give her age. Christi Craddick did not immediately return a phone call from the Associated Press on Wednesday.

The Austin American-Statesman, which first reported on the complaint, said she was a 26-year-old registered lobbyist in 1997 when her father helped her get state health insurance.

Shack, Tom Craddick's lawyer, said he could not provide any information on Christi Craddick's health care benefits either.

According to the 1997 law that provided Christi Craddick lifetime state health insurance, eligible children are required to pay a $365 monthly premium at today's rates. In 2002, five years after the law was passed, only 87 people were provided such coverage, officials said. The state Employee Retirement System could not immediately say Wednesday how many adult children get coverage from their state-employed parents under the provision.

Details of the 1997 law were not revealed until after Tom Craddick had lined up the votes to become speaker in 2002. Former ERS director Sheila Beckett said at the time that Craddick had "initiated" the insurance law change.

"I was assuming he was concerned about the continuing insurance coverage for his daughter," Beckett said then.

Shack said it doesn't matter how the speaker describes his daughter for health insurance purposes because prohibitions against paying dependent children for campaign work fall under a different section of Texas law. And Craddick did not violate those provisions, the lawyer said.

Designed to stop politicians from using their campaign accounts to benefit themselves, their spouses or their dependent children, the law does not set an age limit for dependents. However, state ethics rules say a son or daughter should be considered a dependent if the lawmaker provides more than half "of the child's support" during a calendar year.

"That's aimed at having a child who lives at home," Shack said. "She is paid compensation for work performed. That is not support provided to someone."

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