A trial was scheduled to begin yesterday within the Vatican City of 10 defendants, including a once-powerful cardinal, in a case based on a sprawling probe into the allegedly criminal management of the Holy See’s portfolio of assets, including donations by countless Catholics from the pews.
Among the defendants is an Italian prelate, Angelo Becciu, a longtime Vatican diplomat whom Pope Francis raised to the rank of cardinal in 2018.
After a web of scandals started unraveling during a two-year investigation, Francis gave Becciu the sack last year as chief of the church’s saint-making office. Not waiting to find out the eventual verdict of a Vatican court, Francis also removed Becciu’s rights as a cardinal.
Photo: AFP
Less than three months ago, it would have been impossible for a cardinal to be in the dock in the Vatican City, which has its own justice system and even a jail, but Francis had a Vatican law changed so that Vatican-based cardinals and bishops can be prosecuted and judged by the Holy See’s lay criminal tribunal, as long as the pontiff signs off on it.
Previously, Vatican cardinals could only be judged by their peers, a court of three fellow cardinals.
Becciu, 73, is charged with embezzlement and with pressing a monsignor to recant information he supplied to prosecutors about the handling of a disastrous Vatican real-estate investment in London.
Becciu has denied wrongdoing.
Since a nearly 500-page indictment was issued earlier this month, prosecutors have filed about 30,000 pages of supplemental documentation.
Defense lawyers said that they have not had sufficient time to study the material.
The presiding judge, Giuseppe Pignatone, is a retired chief prosecutor of Rome who earlier in his career took on the mafia.
To accommodate the largest criminal trial in the Vatican’s modern history, the hearings are being held in a large hall converted into a courtroom in the Vatican Museums.
A pool of reporters accredited by the Vatican would be allowed to follow the proceedings in court, but their accounts were not allowed to be filed until after the day’s hearing ends.
Defendants are alleged to have had various roles in actions that effectively cost the Holy See tens of millions of US dollars in donated funds through poor investments, dealings with shady money managers, and purported favors to friends and family.
Looming large in the indictment is the London deal approved by the Vatican secretariat of state.
An initial 200 million euros (US$236 million) was sunk into a fund operated by an Italian businessman. Half that money went into the real-estate venture in London, an investment which eventually cost 350 million euros. By 2018, the original investment was losing money and the Vatican scrambled to find an exit strategy.
Defendants include Cecilia Marogna, who was hired by Becciu as an external security consultant.
Prosecutors allege that she embezzled 575,000 euros in Vatican funds that Becciu had authorized for use as a ransom to free Catholic hostages abroad.
Marogna has said that charges she ran up were reimbursement of her expenses and other money was her compensation.
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