Vatican auditor was forced to quit after spying charges

The Vatican’s first auditorgeneral, who resigned without explanation in June, has broken his silence, saying he was forced to step down withtrumped-up accusations after discovering evidence of possible illegal activity.

Speaking to reporters from four media organisations including Reuters in the office of his lawyers in Rome, Libero Milone also said he believed that some in the Vatican wanted to slow down Pope Francis’s efforts at financial reform.

He said he could not give details of the irregularities he had found because of non-disclosure agreements. Reuters was unable to independently verify his assertions, which the Vatican strongly contested.

The Holy See’s deputy secretary of state, Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu, said in an interview that Mr Milone’s claims were “false and I wrote to the pope in mid-July and gave him my point of view explaining that the whole thing was a set-up Libero Milone, unjustified”.

“He went against all the rules and was spying on the private lives of his superiors and staff, including me,” Becciu said.”If he had not agreed to resign, we would have prosecuted him.”

Domenico Giani, the Vatican’s police chief, said

Libero Milone, who was asked to clean up Vatican finances, quit after two long years

Ex-auditor general also said that the accusations against him were fabricated

had been “overwhelming evidence” against Mr Milone. Neither Becciu nor Giani provided details to support their assertions.

The 69-year-old left the Vatican two years after being hired with great fanfare to introduce more transparency into thesometimes murky finances at the headquarters of the RomanCatholic Church.

At the time of his resignation, with three years left on his contract, neither the Vatican nor Mr Milone, formerly chairman andCEO of the global accounting firm Deloitte in Italy, gave any explanation for his departure. A Vatican statement at the time said only that it was “by mutual agreement”.

Mr Milone, who had also worked for the United Nations and the car giant Fiat, said Becciu had ordered him to resign on the morning of June 19. Mr Milone was told that he was being dismissed on the basis of a seven-month investigation by Vatican police.

“The facts presented to me on the morning of the 19th were fake, fabricated,” he said. “I was in shock. All the reasons had no credible foundation.” Both Becciu and Giani, the police chief, said Mr Milone had been given a choice: resign or face public prosecution by theVatican’s courts. “In a certain sense, we were protecting his reputation,” Becciu said. Mr Milone said he had been accused of misuse of funds for hiring an outside firm to check the security of computers in the Vatican offices where he worked with a staff of 14, includingtwo deputy auditors-generaL.