Vatican fraud suspect cannot be extradited from London, court rules
AN ITALIAN appeals court has definitively annulled the arrest warrant for the prime suspect in the Vatican’s fraud and embezzlement trial, signalling an end to extradition procedures in the UK, his legal team said.
The decision by Rome’s Tribunal of Review is a blow to Italian prosecutors and also the Vatican, which had been trying to bring Gianluigi Torzi back to Italy to eventually stand trial in the Vatican for his role in the Holy See’s costly London property deal.
The Vatican does not have an extradition treaty with the UK, but the city state’s prosecutors had provided evidence to their Italian counterparts who launched their own investigation into Torzi’s finances, alleging tax evasion, money laundering and other alleged crimes, and sought his arrest on an international warrant to stand trial in Italy. London-based Torzi denies wrongdoing in both the Italian and Vatican cases, which will proceed in his absence.
The case in Italy was launched after Vatican prosecutors had already been investigating Torzi for his role in the Holy See’s bungled €350m (£290m) investment in a London residential property. Vatican prosecutors have accused Torzi of trying to extort the Vatican out of €15m (£12m) to turn over full ownership of the property.
The Vatican tribunal indicted him in July, but his status in the trial has been in limbo because of the extradition proceedings between Italy and the UK and the legitimacy of the Italian arrest warrant that launched them.
Italy’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, had annulled the warrant in October and sent the case back to the Tribunal for Review after Torzi’s lawyers appealed.
In its sentence released last month, the Cassation found that Italian prosecutors had not provided full documentation beneficial to Torzi’s defence when the judge was deciding whether to issue the warrant.