In­vest­ment and Trade Min­is­ter Asot Michael has ten­dered his res­ig­na­tion to the An­tigua and Bar­bu­da Prime Min­is­ter Gas­ton Browne.

Michael, the Par­lia­men­tary rep­re­sen­ta­tive for St Pe­ter’s, sub­mit­ted his let­ter yes­ter­day amidst cor­rup­tion al­le­ga­tions which sur­faced in the Unit­ed King­dom.

In ten­der­ing his res­ig­na­tion yes­ter­day. Michael said he re­alised the re­cent me­dia re­ports emerg­ing from court pro­ceed­ings in the Unit­ed King­dom, “to which I am not a par­ty, have caused anx­i­ety in some quar­ters of our so­ci­ety and are be­ing used by op­po­si­tion po­lit­i­cal el­e­ments to seek to dis­cred­it me and the Gov­ern­ment.”

He added, how­ev­er, that he has not been charged with any wrong­do­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to caribbean­newsser­vice.com, Michael, in his let­ter, not­ed that “the me­dia re­ports re­fer to record­ings of con­ver­sa­tions be­tween per­sons oth­er than my­self, and I can­not be held re­spon­si­ble for their ut­ter­ances.”

“The in­ter­ests of the peo­ple of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da and the Gov­ern­ment of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da are and have al­ways been, of pre-em­i­nent con­cern to me through­out my po­lit­i­cal life. I have not worked so dili­gent­ly over the last 21 years for the ad­vance­ment of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, and in sup­port of the An­tigua and Bar­bu­da Labour Par­ty, to al­low the rep­u­ta­tion and stand­ing of the Na­tion and the Par­ty to be tar­nished by po­lit­i­cal ac­tors who are de­ter­mined to pull down the Gov­ern­ment and the Par­ty by be­smirch­ing me,” Michael wrote in the let­ter.

The Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Pro­gres­sive Par­ty (UPP) had called on Browne to dis­miss Michael af­ter he was im­pli­cat­ed among Caribbean politi­cians for al­leged­ly re­ceiv­ing bribes from a British in­vestor.

The ac­cu­sa­tion un­fold­ed in a British High Court last Fri­day in a mat­ter in­volv­ing Pe­ter Vird­ee, whose tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions with his busi­ness part­ner, Di­eter Trutschler, in 2016, had been record­ed by Ger­man au­thor­i­ties. Ac­cord­ing to the tran­script of the doc­u­ment re­vealed in the High Court, Vird­ee al­leges that Michael had asked him for $2 mil­lion, as well as to buy a car for his moth­er. Michael has de­nied the al­le­ga­tions.