Former environment minister Corrado
Clini faced fresh legal woes on Tuesday when he was placed under
investigation for alleged 'transnational corruption' in relation
to projects in China and Montenegro.
On Monday Clini, 67, was placed under house arrest in
connection with a separate probe by prosecutors in the northern
city of Ferrara into allegations of embezzlement in connection
with a water-treatment project in Iraq.
In that investigation investigators claim he and engineer
Augusto Calore Pretner skimmed 3.4 million euros from the
54-million euros New Eden project, a joint Iraqi-Italian
initiative financed by the Italian environment ministry to
restore marshlands in the Tigris and Euphrates basin.
The latest probe by Rome prosecutors involves environmental
redevelopment projects worth 200 million euros in the Chinese
case and 14 million euros in the Montenegro plan.
Clini's wife Martina Hauser and four or five other people
are also implicated in the investigation, prosecution sources
said.
The Iraq probe began in summer 2013 after police spotted a
series of false invoices from Dutch company GBC for payments to
engineering firm Med Ingegneria Srl, based in Ferrara.
Med Ingegneria is part of a consortium, Nature Iraq, that
also includes another engineering firm in which Pretner has a
stake.
Clini, a senior research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School
of Government, was interrogated last October as part of
the investigation.
At the time he was director-general of the environment
ministry, a position he had held before joining the government
of former premier Mario Monti in November 2011, and one he
resumed after the executive was replaced in April 2013.
A graduate in occupational medicine and public health,
Clini also coordinated the technical committee responsible for
drawing up Italy's plan for greenhouse gas emissions reduction
and chaired the inter-ministerial task force for the
implementation of the Kyoto Protocol from 2005 to 2009.
His time in office as environment minister was marked by
his handling of the environmental disaster surrounding the fatal
January 2012 capsizing of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, the
remains of which still rest off the Tuscan island of Giglio.
Clini also handled the case of the troubled ILVA steelworks
in the southern port city of Taranto, parts of which were
impounded by local magistrates in July 2012 over serious
environmental and health concerns, and the rubbish crisis in
Rome.
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