The Vatican Criminal Court sentenced in the first instance, this Saturday (16), the Italian cardinal Angelo Becciu, aged 75, tried together with nine others for fraud, to five and a half years in prison, after a historic trial related to financial operations of the Holy See.
The cardinal was also fined 8,000 euros (US$8,700, or R$42,900 at current exchange rates).
“We respect the verdict, but we will certainly appeal,” declared the defendant’s lawyer, Fabio Vignone.
The prosecutor had demanded seven years and three months in prison for him and a fine of more than 10,000 euros.
A former close advisor to Pope Francis, Cardinal Becciu is the highest-ranking official in the Catholic Church hierarchy to appear before this Vatican court, the City-State’s civil court.
At the center of the case is the purchase, for 350 million euros (US$164 million, or R$810.1 million at current prices), of a luxury building in London between 2014 and 2018, as part of investments by the Holy See , which has considerable real estate assets. This case, with multiple ramifications, puts the opacity of the Vatican’s finances on the table once again.
Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has tried to clean up the Church’s operations. The Argentine pontiff also reformed the judicial system so that bishops and cardinals can be tried in secular courts, and not just in religious bodies.
Prosecutor Alessandro Diddi asked for prison sentences ranging from almost four years to more than 13 years, in addition to financial sanctions, against the ten defendants who appear in court to answer for fraud, embezzlement of funds, abuse of power, money laundering , corruption and extortion.
Of the ten people prosecuted, one was acquitted; two others, ordered to pay a fine; and another, to a suspended prison sentence of one and a half years. The harshest sentence, seven and a half years in prison and a fine of 10,000 euros (about $10,900), went to Fabrizio Tirabassi, a former employee of the Secretariat of State accused of receiving kickbacks.
Former number two of the Secretariat of State, the main body of the central government of the Holy See, at the center of this transaction, Cardinal Becciu maintains his title, but was removed from all his functions in September 2020. The cardinal, born in Sardinia, He always claimed innocence and guaranteed that he “never stole a penny”. He also said he was the victim of a “media lynching”. His lawyers asked for his acquittal.
The court explained that it found Becciu guilty of malpractice because he ordered the payment of a total of 200.5 million dollars between 2013 and 2014, coming from the Secretariat of State’s funds, to a “highly speculative” investment fund led by Raffaele Mincione . The latter was also convicted, with a sentence of five and a half years in prison and a fine of 8,000 euros.
The court also found the cardinal guilty of paying 125,000 euros (about 136,000 dollars) to a cooperative managed by his brother, as well as paying another 570,000 euros (622,000 dollars) to an intermediary for the release of a hostage nun. in Africa. The value, in fact, was never used for this purpose.
The Holy See invited the court to “punish all crimes”, said its Secretary of State, number two in the Vatican, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who considered the Secretariat of State as “the injured party”.
– Various intermediaries –
The court also ordered the confiscation of assets worth 166 million euros (R$894.8 million) from those convicted, as well as the payment of 200 million euros (around R$1 billion) in compensation to the civil parties, four Vatican institutions.
At the end of the 86 hearings in this process known as the “London property”, the debates brought to light the lack of transparency in some of the Holy See’s financial operations, with revelations about wiretapping and opaque procedures through a series of intermediaries.
Among the highlights of the process are the revelations about a telephone conversation between Becciu – on his initiative – with the pope and recorded without his knowledge, shortly before the trial. In it, he asked him to confirm that he had approved confidential financial movements.
The instruction described an “almost impossible to unravel” tangle of speculative investment funds, banks, credit institutions, individuals and legal entities.
This acquisition, at an overvalued price, revealed the reckless use of Saint Peter’s Óbolo, the large annual collection of donations destined for the pope’s charitable actions. It also generated substantial losses in the Vatican’s finances.
The Holy See finally resold the 17,000 m2 building located in the fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, at the cost of heavy losses.
This case was a serious blow to the reputation of the Church and Pope Francis, who multiplied reforms to clean up the Vatican’s finances and combat fraud.
In addition to the creation of a Secretariat for the Economy in 2014, he limited, since his election the previous year, investments and activities of the Vatican Bank, in particular with the closure of 5,000 suspicious accounts.