A cardinal at the heart of a financial trial, unprecedented in the Vatican: the Holy See announced, Saturday, July 3, the referral to its criminal court of ten people, including the influential Angelo Becciu, involved in the affair of opaque financing, via Italian businessmen, of a luxury building in London.
Cardinal Becciu, 73, who was a close collaborator of the Pope, will appear with his co-defendants before the court of the Holy See from July 27. He is being prosecuted for embezzlement, abuse of power and witness tampering in this case, the first elements of which began to appear in the Italian press in September 2020, when Pope Francis dismissed him from his functions.
In a statement released on Saturday by his entourage, the cardinal said to himself “Victim of a conspiracy” and protested his “Absolute innocence”. Claiming to have been nailed to the “Media pillory”, he said he was in a hurry to explain himself. Angelo Becciu was number two in the Secretariat of State, the central administration of the Holy See, when the process to purchase the London building began in 2014.
Among the other defendants, the Swiss René Brülhart, former president of the Financial Information Authority (AIF), the financial gendarme of the Holy See, must answer for abuse of power.
Two ecclesiastics will also be judged: Monsignor Mauro Carlino, long-time private secretary of Angelo Becciu, and Monsignor Enrico Crasso, former manager of the reserved heritage of the Secretary of State, a windfall of several hundred million euros coming largely from the “Denarius of Saint Peter”, in other words donations from individuals to the Vatican.
The other implicated are Tommaso Di Ruzza, former director of the AIF, Cecilia Marogna, known as “The lady of the cardinal”, a young Italian consultant who had been entrusted with half a million euros by the secretariat of State on an account in Slovenia, the investor Raffaele Mincione, the lawyer Nicola Squillace, Fabrizio Tirabassi, a former senior secular official of the Vatican, and Gianluigi Torzi, a broker arrested last May in London. Through the voice of their lawyers, René Brülhart and Mauro Carlino argued on Saturday that they had always been “Loyal” and worked “In the interest of the Holy See”.
Luxury apartments in Chelsea
The investment at the heart of the scandal is a building in the chic London district of Chelsea, on Sloane Avenue, 17,000 square meters transformed into some fifty luxury apartments. A first participation was taken in the project in 2014 via a Luxembourg fund managed by the holding company of Raffaele Mincione. The opaque financial management, via Switzerland and Luxembourg, had prompted the Vatican four years later to put an end to it by buying the whole of the London building.
The price of the building was very overvalued, greedy intermediaries and considerable sums went up in smoke. With other hazardous investments, the damage to the Vatican would amount to several hundred million euros, according to the Italian press.
In November 2019, Pope Francis acknowledged to the press the existence of a “Scandal” corruption within the Vatican. “We did things that weren’t clean”, had regretted the sovereign pontiff.
The London building trial “Is directly linked to the directives and reform of His Holiness Pope Francis in favor of transparency and the consolidation of Vatican finances”, said the Holy See on Saturday.
The Argentine pope was elected in 2013 to bring order to Vatican finances, a difficult reform that has encountered resistance within certain “dicasteries” (ministries) managing funds in a very autonomous and not very transparent manner. In 2017, he found that “Reform” the Roman curia (the Vatican government) came back to “Clean the Egyptian sphinx with a toothbrush”.
To this end, he created the all-powerful secretariat for the economy in 2014, cleaned up the once sulphurous Vatican bank, where 5,000 suspicious accounts were closed in 2015, supervised tenders for its internal expenses, and entrusted to the administration of the patrimony of the apostolic see (APSA) the management of the budgets of the numerous administrations of the Vatican.