Colin Campbell yesterday became the first political casualty of the untidy Trafigura affair, handing in his resignation to Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, with the image of the ruling People’s National Party (PNP) bleeding uncontrollably.

Late evening, amid rumours that swirled all day that Campbell, the information and development minister and PNP general-secretary had been fired, Simpson Miller said she had accepted the resignation.

Campbell was the man at the centre of the Trafigura storm, having handled the transactions, but he was accused of not giving the party lawyers all the relevant facts that would have prevented them from embarrassing themselves and the party, by stridently defending him in public.

In possibly the worst day of her seven-month administra-tion yesterday, Simpson Miller also announced through party chairman, Bobby Pickersgill that she had ordered her party to give back oil trader Trafigura Baheer the $31 million that brought about Campbell’s demise.

But Pickersgill declined to provide the Observer with details about when the money would be repaid or how the party would raise the funds to make the repayment, assuming that its coffers were bare.

“Mr Campbell tendered his resignation to the Prime Minister and Party Leader, in view of misunderstandings that have emerged regarding the funds received by the party from Trafigura Baheer,” Simpson Miller said in a statement issued by her press secretary, Lincoln Robinson.

The statement did not give details of the “misunderstandings”.

“The Prime Minister expressed her gratitude to Senator Campbell for his sterling service to the country, the Cabinet and to the Party and said she recognised that, by accepting responsibility and resigning, he had acted in the highest traditions of public life,” she said.

In the interim, Simpson Miller will assume responsibilities for the portfolios held by Campbell, the statement from Jamaica House said..

Campbell, the first Jamaican journalist to become a minister of information, sounded relieved last night that it was over.

“I can get some sleep now,” he told the Observer, an obvious reference to the hours of gruelling meetings lasting from Friday through Saturday midnight, in which the party top brass wrestled with the issue of his termination.

Political analysts read into the resignation a desire by the PNP to cauterise the wound cause by the Trafigura scandal.

But indicating that the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) was going for the jugular, Bruce Golding immediately rejected Campbell’s resignation or the return of the Trafigura funds as “not enough to bring closure to the matter”.

Addressing obviously buoyed supporters in a packed auditorium at the Knockalva High School in Ramble, St James, Golding insisted only the resignation of the entire government would suffice.

“If the PNP is lying, to hand us Colin Campbell as a sacrifice is not enough,” the JLP leader declared.

It was Golding’s dramatic revelation last week that the PNP had received $31 million from Trafigura, the Dutch firm that sells Nigerian supplied crude oil for Jamaica on the international market, that set the cat among the pigeons.

The first civilian casualty was Sonia Christie, a senior executive at FirstCaribbean International Bank (FCIB), who was sent on three days leave, while the bank investigated who leaked the information to the JLP that the money had been deposited into a PNP campaign account named CCOC.

Christie is the wife of Falmouth deputy mayor, Fitz Christie and was closely associated with Pearnel Charles’ re-election to his Clarendon constituency in 2002.

The leak has also thrown FCIB into a tizzy over the breach in its vaunted confidentiality rules and Observer sources said the bank’s big wigs from headquarters in Barbados had arrived in the island to help mastermind the damage control activities.

In the meantime, Pickersgill rubbished news reports that former prime minister and party president, PJ Patterson, had recommended that Campbell be asked to reign or be fired from public office.

“If Mr Patterson made those recommendations it must have been to some underling in the party because he never made them me or any other member of the executive,” Pickersgill said.

Campbell too denied Observer reports that he had met Trafigura representatives in New York, saying he had actually met them in Jamaica in mid-August. Neither did he tell any Observer reporter that he had not resigned or and had not been fired.

And last night, the JLP-affiliated Generation 2000 (G2K) joined its parent party in urging the PNP government to leave office because of the Trafigura scandal.