Vatican hospital’s ex-chief guilty in money scheme

VATICAN CITY — A Vatican court on Saturday convicted the former president of the pope’s children’s hospital of diverting about $500,000 in donations to renovate a cardinal’s flat.

The original charges against Giuseppe Profiti had been embezzlement. But the court convicted him of a lesser offense of abuse of office and gave him a one-year suspended sentence after the defense argued the money was intended as an investment to benefit the hospital.

The three-judge tribunal absolved Bambino Gesu pediatric hospital’s former treasurer, Massimo Spina. Notably, neither the cardinal who benefited from the renovation nor the contractor who was apparently paid twice for doing the work was charged.

The trial revealed the “opacity, silence and poor management” in the handling of Vatican assets, prosecutor Roberto Zanotti said in his closing arguments. A lack of financial transparency and accountability has plagued the Holy See for centuries and has been a top concern for Francis’ reform-minded papacy.

And it shined further light on the finances of the Bambino Gesu hospital, which was the subject of an Associated Press investigation earlier this year.

After retiring in 2013, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s former secretary of state, was assigned a 4,305-squarefoot, top-floor apartment in the Vatican-owned Palazzo San Carlo. The building sits on the edge of the Vatican gardens, offers views of St. Peter’s Basilica and overlooks the Vatican hotel where Francis lives.

During the trial, the cardinal was shown to have personally engineered the maneuver to get an old friend, Gianantonio Bandera, to do the renovation. Bertone’s project jumped the queue for Vatican real estate repairs and avoided the normal external bidding process required for such an expensive overhaul — possibly because he promised to foot the bill himself.

While Bertone paid some $355,000 out of his own pocket, the hospital foundation also paid Bandera’s firm about $500,000 for the job.

In closing arguments Saturday, defense lawyer Antonello Blasi insisted there was no crime in investing foundation money in the renovation since Profiti intended to use Bertone’s apartment for fundraising events to benefit the hospital.

“Investing is not the same thing as spending,” Blasi told the court.

Profiti, for his part, told the court that the only reason the operation didn’t provide a return on the investment was because the new administration that replaced his had a “new style of fundraising” and didn’t use the apartment.

Although Bertone never was charged, lawyers nevertheless went to his defense on Saturday. Pressured by the pope to vacate his apartment and assigned a “hovel” in need of repairs, the 82-year-old Bertone won’t live long enough to justify the money he put into the apartment, said Alfredo Ottaviani, who represented the absolved Spina.

“He was the victim of the trial,” Ottaviani told the court in closing arguments, adding that Bertone could have avoided participating altogether but chose instead to write a detailed letter to the court laying out what transpired.

In the end, Bandera’s firm, Castelli Re, went bankrupt, and the hospital’s money was sent instead to another Bandera company located in Britain, Lg Contractors Ltd.

That might have been the transaction that tripped up the Vatican’s financial regulators, who were called to testify at trial but declined to provide details, citing the need to keep their intelligence-gathering operations secret.

The only hint of a potential kickback involved a proposed six-figure “donation” from Bandera to the hospital foundation. Profiti said he “didn’t exclude” that he had sought such a donation, and Spina testified that he tried to get the money out of Bandera. Bandera, however, pleaded financial hardship after his company went bankrupt and never provided the money.

Neither Bertone nor Bandera was indicted in the case, though it is possible that prosecutors in the Vatican and Italy now have the evidence they need to mount a case against the builder over the allegation that he was paid twice for the same work.

At the trial, Bandera testified that he never billed twice for the work, though he acknowledged he was no longer fully in control of the company after it went bankrupt in early 2014.

Bertone has insisted he knew nothing of the hospital’s payment. After the scandal came to light in late 2015, Bertone quickly made a $177,300 donation to the hospital. He insisted it wasn’t a payback but rather was a gesture of goodwill.