Cardinal Becciu
Gave a "somewhat incomplete" testimony to the Vatican court where he is accused of embezzlement.
Gave a "somewhat incomplete" testimony to the Vatican court where he is accused of embezzlement.
There was no hint of that alleged Christian love and forgiveness in the Vatican the other day when Cardinal Pell, former financial controller at the Vatican, put the boot in to Cardinal Becciu, once his detractor in his attempts to reorganise and regularise the Vatican's Byzantine finances, who is now on trial in the Vatican, charged with embezzlement.
In his testimony to the court, Pell accused Becciu of making a "somewhat incomplete" testimony - polite code for lying.
Regular readers may recall how Pell was originally brought in to clean up the Vatican's finances when the Vatican Bank was found to be laundering very large sums of money for organised crime under cover of the diplomatic immunity endowed on the Vatican as an independent state in its own right. The Vatican was reputedly on the verge of bankruptcy, not even having enough funds to pay for its day to day activities.
During the course of his investigations, Pell found that heads of departments in the Vatican had control of secret slush funds running into hundreds of millions of Euros, accountable only to them with no proper records of where the money came from or what it was spent on. When put under Pell's control, they restored the Vatican's finances to good health but in the course of this, Pell made many powerful enemies who resented being accountable and not have vast resources of their own to spend as they wished. One of these was Cardinal Becciu, who as sostituto of the Secretariat of State was effectively Pope Francis Chief of Staff.
Pell eventually ran into difficulties of his own when allegations of his involvement in the sexual abuse of minors began to circulate in Australia where he had been the senior Catholic cleric. At Pope Francis' insistence he returned to Australia to face charges of which he was initially convicted and given a custodial sentence, only to have the convictions quashed by the Australian Supreme Court on a technicality. Before he left Rome, Pell had signed up auditors PriceWaterhouseCoopers, to audit the Vatican's finances. Immediately on Pell's departure to Australia, Becciu celebrated by, for reasons which he has never satisfactorily explained, summarily cancelling the contract with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Again for reason never explained, the Vatican's own internal auditor, Libero Milone, also resigned, so the Vatican accounts remained unaudited.
The reasons for this cancellation soon began to emerge however when Becciu began using a fund known as "Peters' Pence", which is donated to by Catholics in an annual fund-raising event in the belief that it is for the Pope to use for charitable purposes, for donations to, for example, his brother's Sardinia-based ‘refugee charity’, and to bail out a private hospital in Rome where his niece had recently been taken onto the staff, which was facing financial difficulties, and to pay €500,000 to a 'security advisor', Cecilia Marogna, known in the Italian press as “the cardinal’s lady”. Marogna was subsequently arrested in Milan and charged with embezzlement.
Becciu also invested heavily in a property deal in London which was to be his eventual downfall. According to a report in the online Catholic news magazine, The Crux:
The deal was brokered in 2014, while Becciu was the sostituto, through an Italian financier and drawing upon funds collected by “Peter’s Pence,” an annual appeal directed to Catholics around the world as a way to support the pope’s activity, especially his charitable works. The original deal was for 50 percent of the London property, but the Secretariat of State eventually soured on its relationship with the first financier and planned to purchase the rest of the property with the aid of another.The upshot was that the businessman Raffaele Mincione, the owner of the London property in question - the former Harrods shop in Chelsea - was also charged with money-laundering and embezzlement, as was Gianluigi Torzi who had been enlisted to help push through the deal. He was also charged with extortion. Readers may recall how last April, Torzi successfully applied to Southwark Crown Court to have a freeze on his bank accounts lifted. Judge Tony Baumgartner cited the lies and inconsistencies in statements from Vatican officials as his reason for unfreezing the account. The Vatican subsequently applied to have Torizi extradited from the UK to face charges of embezzlement.
The Secretariat of State appealed to the Institute for the Works of Religion, the so-called “Vatican bank,” for a loan to finance that transaction, which triggered an internal investigation. In October 2019, Pope Francis authorized raids at Secretary of State as well as the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority (AIF), which monitors for suspicious financial transactions, and seven officials were either suspended or fired along with Becciu who was reported to have 'resigned' suddenly.
Not only did Becciu have to approve the deal, but he’s been accused of attempting to disguise the loans it required by cancelling them out on Vatican balance sheets against the value of the property, a practice prohibited by general accounting norms and specifically forbidden by legislation decreed by Pope Francis in 2014.
However, according to the Italian magazine, Il Messaggero at the time, Becciu's sacking was not over possible misuse of Vatican money in the London purchase, but over allegations of embezzlement, again involving the "Peter's Pence" slush fund, but this time in the form of a 'gift' of €100,000 to a charity run by Becciu's brother in Sardinia. The charity's official purpose it to help refugees, but the money appears to be unused and sitting in the charity's banks account (according to Il Messaggero).
Now the plot has thickened with Pell's testimony. The issue now is over Becciu's account of the payment of $AU 2.3 million [$1.6 million] to the Australian firm, Neustar, allegedly for the rights to the Internet domain name ‘.catholic’, supposedly from the Vatican Council for Social Communications, but Pell raised the question whether this was from that council or from the Secretariat of State. The suspicion now is that it may have been a device for channelling money to pay for Pell's defence in his struggle with the law over the allegations of child sexual abuse.
The murky world of Vatican finances continues to give off the noxious stink of corruption as yet more bubbles burst on the surface of that stinking cesspit in the heart of Rome.
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