A senior official in Italy who is responsible for immigration and civil liberties has resigned after it emerged his wife was under investigation for allegedly exploiting migrant labourers on a farm.
Michele Di Bari, who was handed his job in the interior ministry by Matteo Salvini, the leader of the anti-migrant League party, insisted that his wife had always respected the law and was confident that magistrates would clear her of any culpability in the matter.
His wife, Rosalba Bisceglia, is one of 16 people under investigation on suspicion of exploiting migrant workers and using gang-masters to hire them. Two alleged gang-masters, from Senegal and Gambia, have been arrested.
Bisceglia, 55, is the administrator of a farm near the southern city of Foggia that grows vegetables and cereals.
The accusations concern the plight of the mainly African migrants, who were allegedly employed without contracts, paid less than the national agricultural wage and expected to work long hours with minimal rest.
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Investigators said the ten companies under review in the inquiry had a combined turnover of €5 million, while the workers lived in unsafe and unhygienic conditions in a large migrant shanty town.
Di Bari, 62, is known for his public denunciations of those who exploit vulnerable workers and for a series of critical reports he commissioned into the activities of Domenico Lucano, the progressive former mayor of Riace, who sought to revitalise his town by welcoming and integrating migrants.
Lucano was sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment in September for abetting illegal immigration, at the end of a trial that stemmed in part from the investigations ordered by Di Bari.
Italy employs an estimated 500,000 agricultural workers, about 80 per cent of them migrants. A UN working group on business and human rights highlighted “serious and persistent human rights abuses relating to business activities in Italy” at the end of a ten-day official visit in October.
Migrant workers in agriculture were “trapped in a cycle of exploitation, debt bondage and human rights abuses that must be broken,” Surya Deva, the leader of the UN delegation, said.
