A junior French minister resigned on Friday as a scandal implicating him in the awarding of lucrative public contracts to members of his family hit President Francois Hollande's Socialist government with another bruising. Kader Arif, a junior minister for veteran affairs, became the latest member of Hollande's government to step down under a cloud of suspicion in what has been a year of political and personal calamities for the most unpopular French president in modern history.
An investigation was launched in September in the south-western city of Toulouse into whether two event management companies run by Arif's brother and nephew benefited from favouritism in the awarding of public contracts worth millions of euros. Arif "handed in his resignation in order to provide all the details necessary to establish the truth in the preliminary investigation by financial prosecutors in which he is implicated," the presidency said in a statement. His resignation comes just over two months after trade minister Thomas Thevenoud was sacked for tax irregularities only two weeks after being appointed in a shock cabinet reshuffle following a party rebellion.
That resignation had uncomfortable echoes of the so-called Cahuzac affair, when Hollande's budget minister Jerome Cahuzac was sacked in March 2013 for evading taxes through non-declared Swiss bank accounts.
Comments
Comments are closed.