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Rome: Italy's Economic Development Minister Federica Guidi resigned on Thursday after her partner was accused of abusing his connections to the centre-left government.
Guidi's partner, Gianluca Gemelli, is being investigated but has not been arrested as part of a criminal probe into the illegal disposal of waste from an oil production centre in the Basilicata region in the south of the country.
ENI, the energy group, which operates the Val d'Agri facility said it was suspending production at the 75,000-barrels-a-day plant following the arrest of six employees suspected of conspiring to present dangerous waste as benign.
Gemelli, a local businessman with interests in oil services, was allegedly implicated in the disposal of the waste.
Italian media reported that, as part of their probe, the investigators had recorded a conversation between the minister and her partner in which she assures him that the council of ministers would approve an amendment to last year's budget which he had suggested.
The prosecutors suspect he was acting on behalf of French oil company Total in return for a promise his company would be given the right to bid for sub-contracted engineering work at another extraction centre in the region, Tempa Rossa.
In her resignation letter, Guidi told Prime Minister Matteo Renzi she was stepping down immediately to save the government further damage but insisted she had done nothing wrong.
"Dear Matteo, I am absolutely certain I acted in good faith and in the correctness of my actions," she wrote. "I believe however it is necessary for political reasons that I resign from my post as minister."
Guidi's resignation comes a year after Renzi ordered his transport minister Maurizio Lupi to quit after it emerged a businessman embroiled in a corruption scandal had given Lupi's son a 10,000-euro Rolex watch.
The latest scandal will come as a further blow to Renzi's attempts to portray himself and his government as representing a break from Italy's dark past of cronyism and sleaze in public life.
AFP
