Cardinal Angelo Becciu implicates Pope Francis in financial corruption megatrial

Angelo Becciu claimed the Pontiff himself had orchestrated the mysterious 2017 resignation of the Vatican’s first auditor general, an event widely cited as suspicious.

Angelo Becciu, Picture: Andreas Solaro/AFP

The gloves are off in Vatican City as Angelo Becciu, the disgraced cardinal at the centre of a financial corruption megatrial, moved to implicate Pope Francis in a bid to save himself.

Becciu opened a marathon two-day tribunal hearing this week by denying he had orchestrated the mysterious 2017 resignation of the Vatican’s first auditor general, Libero Milone, appointed to work alongside Cardinal George Pell to clean up and reform the Holy See’s sclerotic and antiquated financial systems.

Rather, Becciu claimed on Wednesday that Francis himself had ordered the removal of Mil­one. Becciu had previously refused to answer questions on the sacking, citing “love of the Holy Father” for his silence but told the tribunal that the pontiff had now given him permission to speak.

Milone, he alleged, had hired an outside firm to investigate him as well as the activities of other senior Vatican officials and thus had lost the “trust of the Holy Father”. Francis had not only asked him to seek Milone’s resignation but apologised for giving him the unpalatable task.

Asked about his relationship with the Secretariat of the Economy and its then chief, Pell, Becciu said he thought the Australian had wanted to mount a “field invasion” into the “sovereign” finances of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. The Vatican provided no detail when it announced the resignation on June 20, 2017, of Milone, a former Deloitte’s boss, just two years after he was headhunted to conduct a forensic investigation into Vatican financial dealings.

His unexplained removal along with the cancellation of a PricewaterhouseCoopers contract as Holy See auditors has since been widely cited by seasoned observers as well as Pell as evidence the new financial team had come very close to unearthing illicit economic activities within the Secretariat of State.

Three months after his resignation, Milone broke his silence and told Italian media and The Australian he had been interrogated for hours by Vatican police and forced to leave his post after he had requested documentation that he believed would uncover evidence of potentially illegal financial transactions in the Vatican.

In a series of heated exchanges during this week’s seven-hour interrogation by senior Vatican prosecutor Alessandro Diddi, Becciu appeared to lose patience, responding to forensic questioning with “I don’t remember” and at one point banging his fist on the table, insisting while his memory was failing him, he had “always and only worked for the good of the Holy See”.

George Pell wanted to mount a ‘field invasion’, said Becciu. Picture: Victor Sokolowicz

Tempers became so frayed at one point that tribunal president Giuseppe Pignatone was forced to briefly halt proceedings in a bid to calm the protagonists.

Hundreds of documents, phone chats lifted from laptops, letters, meeting minutes and newspaper articles were projected on the walls of the Vatican Museum hall turned courtroom as Diddi fired questions on issues ranging from the circumstances of the controversial €350 million ($621 million) London property investment to the decision to host one of his co-defendants, Cecilia Marogna, a self-styled “intelligence agent” in his apartment overnight.

“She came one evening to speak to me and it got late … when she was leaving, the nuns who assist me told me she was frightened to go to her hotel because of Covid and asked if she could stay,” Becciu said.

“I said yes. She slept in their quarters. I found her again the next day at breakfast when we said goodbye.”

In an unexpected personal statement filed to the court on Thursday, Marogna explained her job in what a US newspaper described as “James Bond-style” terms, stating her responsibilities to the Holy See ranged from trying to free a captive nun in Colombia to meeting Russian emissaries of Vladimir Putin who wished to negotiate the return to the Russian Orthodox Church of holy relics held in a cathedral in southern Italy.

She is accused of using Vatican payments to buy luxury goods.

Dubbed the “trial of the century” and featuring fraud, conspiracy and embezzlement charges against Becciu and nine others involved in the purchase of the London building on Sloane Avenue, the case aims to shed new light on wider investments made by the Vatican Secretariat of State, including the alleged use of Peter’s Pence, funds provided by the Catholic faithful, for high-risk speculative projects.

Cecilia Marogna, 39, has denied that she misused Vatican funds. Picture: Myspace

Asked to provide detail of its investment policy, Becciu said he could not as it was the responsibility of the Office of Administration to prepare dossiers before proceeding with financial decisions. This meant they – not him – bore the “moral obligation” to ensure that no problems were encountered. In the case of the Sloane Avenue building, a former Harrod’s showroom earmarked for redevelopment into apartments, he insisted the proposal was “totally to the advantage of the Holy See” but it was impossible for him to go into detail because “that was their job”.

The cardinal told the prosecutor he simply couldn’t remember many of the hundreds of documents showing his signature and screened on the court’s walls because of the “stress of the trial” and because there was so much paperwork to deal with in the Secretariat of State.

Becciu was pushed, however, to consider notes of a meeting held late in May 2020 with Giancarlo Innocenzi Botti, a former undersecretary in the Berlusconi government, as well as a former Italian ambassador to the US, Alessandro Cattaneo, who wished to present details of the proposed London purchase.

The project was then presented to Francis by Becciu, who also vouched for the gravitas of the two men but did not, according to the tribunal, pass on criticisms raised by Father Juan Guerrero Alves, the current prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy who in an email said he was “sceptical” about the plans.

The prosecutor also forced Becciu to look at a WhatsApp message he sent to the former Vatican investment manager and ex-Credit Suisse official, Enrico Crasso, who was one of the so-called gang of four laymen and brokers involved in the failed London deal. The message said: “When the time is right, we need to launch a campaign in the press! In fact, why don’t you do that straight away … ask your lawyer if it is now time to debunk the magistrates?”

Diddi asked Becciu if he had indeed commissioned negative articles critical of the investigation into the London property deal. Becciu insisted it was a conversation with a desperate man and he was simply advising him to defend himself “in the best way he could find”.