Disgraced cardinal told George Pell $2.3m payment ‘none of his business’

George Pell told a Vatican Tribunal that Cardinal Angelo Becciu sent him a message to say that $2.3m sent from the Holy See to Australia was “none of my business but was known to the Holy Father”.

Disgraced cardinal Angelo Becciu and the late cardinal George Pell.

The late cardinal George Pell told a Vatican Tribunal that his disgraced colleague, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, sent him a message to say that $2.3m sent from the Holy See to Australia was “none of my (Pell’s) business but was known to the Holy Father”.

This is in direct contradiction with the assertion made by Cardinal Becciu in a Belgian TV documentary last week, and reported by The Australian, that the mysterious payments had been authorised by Pell himself.

In May 2022, just months before he died after undergoing a routine hip replacement operation in a Rome hospital, Pell was clearly angry and upset enough to lodge a statement with the Vatican Tribunal which fiercely rebutted Cardinal Becciu’s earlier account to the court of the mysterious $2.3m payments to a tech security firm called Neustar.

The funds, Cardinal Becciu told the Tribunal and Vatican prosecutors, were to secure the domain name dot.catholic instead of dot.org or dotcom. In Pell’s statement, held in Tribunal evidence bundles, the late cardinal acknowledged that the Pontifical Council for Social Communications had indeed paid Neustar Australia for their “expensive services and to ICANN, the registry, for the reservation of the title ‘Catholic’ in the years 2012, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.”

However, he said he was interested in four different unexplained payments, with a value of $2.3m made by the Secretariat of State in 2017 and 2018 to Neustar Australia.

“Obviously, these are different payments from those of September 11, 2015, which I allegedly authorised. “Doubts, of course, are removed by facts, by evidence, not assertions. What was the purpose? Where did the money go after Neustar?” Pell said.

“Let us see. Truth is the daughter of time,” he concluded.

Ever since Pell left Rome in June 2017 to face charges of sexual abuse in Australia, Italian media has speculated about the possibility that lawyers and even witnesses may have been paid in an effort to help secure the conviction for which he was later exonerated. To date, no concrete evidence has emerged to prove such allegations.

Cardinal Angelo Becciu with his brother Antonio in the Belgian documentary.

However, the Belgian documentary, filmed over a couple of years and featuring several face-to-face interviews with Cardinal Becciu, highlights the coincidence in timing and notes that the payments began precisely at the time when Pell and the then auditor-general, Libero Milone, had started to ask questions about a murky property deal in London.

This turned out to be the Sloane Avenue real estate scandal that would spark the corruption trial and cost the Holy See hundreds of millions of euros in losses, including six-figure kickbacks to several middlemen and brokers, many of them convicted and sentenced.

The trial also uncovered myriad risky investments in questionable projects, including a company that produces contraceptives.

A document showing two payments to the value of $US618,000 were authorised by then Archbishop Becciu in 2017 and 2018.

The Vatican Tribunal was also provided with a document, obtained by The Australian, which shows that two payments to the value of $US618,000 were authorised by then Archbishop Becciu on May 17, 2017 and June 6, 2018 and the account number to which they were destined.

Two other payments, to the value of $US358,250 were made by Monsignor Paolo Borgia, a Vatican prelate and diplomat.

In the documentary, Cardinal Becciu dismissed claims that funds were used against Pell as “crazy, crazy stuff” and “manipulated news”.

Mr Milone, however, has long argued that Pell’s return to Australia was orchestrated to stop the pair of them from uncovering further financial corruption within the Vatican.