Former Italian environment minister
Corrado Clini told ANSA Tuesday that he was satisfied after
being released from house arrest.
Clini was placed under house arrest in May as part of a
probe by prosecutors in the northern city of Ferrara into
allegations of embezzlement in connection with a water-treatment
project in Iraq.
Investigators suspect that 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 day after he was put under house arrest, Rome
prosecutors said he was also being probed in a separated
investigation into alleged corruption linked to environmental
redevelopment projects worth 200 million euros in China
case and 14 million euros in Montenegro.
Clini's wife Martina Hauser and several other people
are also implicated in that investigation.
The Iraq probe began in summer 2013 after police spotted a
series of allegedly 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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