Vatican in the dock: Biggest criminal case in its modern history begins
VATICAN CITY: A trial opened on Tuesday within Vatican City’s imposing walls 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 long-time Vatican diplomat whom Pope Francis raised to cardinal’s rank in 2018. After a web of scandals started unraveling during a two-year investigation, Francis gave Becciu the boot last year as chief of the Catholic church’s saint-making office. Not waiting for find out the eventual verdict of a Vatican court, Francis also has removed Becciu’s rights as a cardinal.
Less than three months ago, it would have been impossible for a cardinal to be in the dock in Vatican City state, which has its own justice system and even a jail. But Francis had a Vatican law changed so that Vaticanbased cardinals and bishops can be prosecuted and judged by the Holy See’s lay criminal tribunal as long as the pontiff signs off on that. 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 the disastrous Vatican real estate investment in London. Becciu has denied any wrongdoing.
Since a nearly 500-page indictment was issued in early July, prosecutors have filed some 30,000 pages of supplemental documentation. Defence lawyers say they haven’t 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 and economic wrongdoing in Sicily.
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. Defendants are alleged to have had various roles in actions that effectively cost the Holy See tens of millions of dollars in donated funds through poor investments, dealings with shady money managers and purported favours 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 was sunk into a fund operated by an Italian businessman. Half that money went into the real estate venture in the swank Chelsea neighbourhood, an investment which eventually cost 350 million euros.
In another twist, Becciu is accused of paying defendant Cecilia Marogna 575,000 euros in Vatican funds earmarked for freeing captive priests and nuns abroad that Marogna - dubbed “the Cardinal’s lady” by the Italian press - spent on luxury goods and hotels.