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Vaughan Gething, the first minister of Wales, announced his resignation on Tuesday after less than four months, amid a controversy over campaign donations that prompted a vote of no confidence in his leadership.
Gething, a Labour Party politician who became the first Black person to lead a national government in Europe when he was elected the head of the Welsh Parliament in March, denied any wrongdoing as he announced in a written statement that he was stepping down.
“A growing assertion that some kind of wrongdoing has taken place has been pernicious, politically motivated and patently untrue,” said Gething, as he delivered the same statement later in front of the Welsh Parliament, known as the Senedd, adding that in his 11 years as a lawmaker, he had “never ever made a decision for personal gain.”
Wales, like Scotland and Northern Ireland, is part of the United Kingdom but also has its own devolved government, which makes local laws and enacts national legislation and policies. Gething became the first minister after the resignation of a long-serving predecessor, Mark Drakeford, winning a tight leadership election within Wales’s governing Labour Party.
But he lost a confidence vote in the Welsh Parliament last month over his acceptance of campaign donations from a company whose owner had twice been convicted of environmental offenses.
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That company, Dauson Environmental Group, donated a total of £200,000, or about $259,000, to Mr. Gething’s leadership campaign in two separate payments, one in December last year and another in January. David Neal, the company’s director, was convicted in 2013 after another of his companies, Atlantic Recycling, was found to have illegally dumped waste in protected wetlands. In 2017 he was convicted again for not removing that waste. The company pleaded guilty in court to another offense in January 2024.
The BBC reported in March that Mr. Gething had lobbied Wales’s environmental regulator on behalf of Atlantic Recycling in 2016 and in 2018. A spokesperson for Gething told the BBC it was “routine practice” for lawmakers to correspond with public bodies regarding constituency issues.
After the details of the donation were made public, some lawmakers said Mr. Gething should not have accepted the funds, including the man running against him for the leadership role, and others urged him to return it. He refused.
Questions over Gething’s leadership intensified in May after he fired a minister for allegedly leaking a text message from 2020, in which he had announced he was deleting messages from a group chat during the Covid-19 pandemic in case they were later exposed by a Freedom of Information request. In the text, he wrote: “I’m deleting the messages in this group. They can be captured in an FOI and I think we are all in the right place on the choice being made.” The lawmaker denied she had leaked the message.
Gething chose to remain in his role despite losing the confidence vote in June, but on Tuesday morning, four members of his government announced their resignations in an organized attempt to force his departure.
One of them was Jeremy Miles, the economy secretary, who had run against Mr. Gething in the leadership election.