Migrant crop picker activist and trade unionist turned politician Aboubakar Soumahoro posted a video of himself crying on Facebook at the weekend saying a worker exploitation probe against a cooperative he set up with his family was baseless.
"Can you tell what I've done?" said the 42-year-old Ivorian native.
"I've been struggling for people's rights all my life, Twenty years in the streets to try to give people dignity. My life has been characterized by the fight against all forms of exploitation. You want me dead, I'm a clean person".
The Green Europe-Italian Left MP has been in the eye of the storm since last Thursday because of an investigation, at the moment without charges being posited, and in which his name does not even appear, by prosecutors in Latina south of Rome.
The probe is into an alleged failure to pay workers and very poor conditions of assistance for them by the Karibu collective and the Aid Consortium, companies in which Soumahoro's wife and mother-in-law have had leading roles.
The mother-in-law, Maria Therese Mukamitsindo, told the left-leaning La Repubblica daily Monday that "some mistakes were made, but everything was paid to the refugees. Everything is recorded in the books and I can prove it".
Her daughter Liliane Murekatete confirmed that "everything is above board" in the cooperatives run by the Soumahoro family in the Pomptine Plain south of Rome, vast former marshalnds reclaimed and turned into rich agricultural land by Mussolini in the 1930s.
She also said that her husband "has never got involved in the coops, and we never talk about them in the family," while adding that the companies did not have money to promptly pay workers "because the State does not pay us in time".
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