Disgraced Cardinal battles corruption charges
Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu was a rising star under Pope Francis — until corruption charges left him battling for exoneration and his freedom.
Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu walked the short distance from his apartment in Vatican City to the residence of Pope Francis, expecting to discuss his work overseeing the canonisation of saints.
The Italian cardinal was a star, even mentioned as a potential future pope. Twenty minutes later, he emerged from the 2020 meeting with a very different status — that of an accused criminal. Vatican magistrates alleged Becciu had embezzled more than $100,000 through a nonprofit group run by his brother. Francis told Becciu to resign his Vatican post.
Since the summer of 2021, the 75-year-old Becciu has been on trial for embezzlement, abuse of office and witness tampering. He is the first cardinal to be tried in Vatican City’s criminal court, and prosecutors are seeking a sentence of more than seven years in prison. Becciu has denied any wrongdoing.
Nine others, including former Vatican officials and outsiders, face charges in the trial, which centres on losses from a failed London property investment. The charges also concern the alleged theft of money intended to free a kidnapped nun but purportedly spent instead on resort vacations and luxury goods from Prada and Louis Vuitton.
Verdicts are expected this week in the case, which has aired accusations of Vatican vendettas, as well as Becciu’s secretly recorded conversation with the pope.
Francis was elected with a mandate to reform the Vatican’s management and improve its often slapdash finances, following years of scandals. Yet progress in modernising its governance has been patchy. The Vatican didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The case highlights the tension that comes with trying to build a modern state administration under an absolute monarch. Political infighting, sometimes descending to skulduggery, can make or break careers at the global headquarters of the Catholic Church, which counts more than a billion baptised Catholics worldwide.
Francis changed Vatican laws several times during the investigation in ways that defendants’ lawyers said favoured the prosecution and violated the right to a fair trial, including broader authority to eavesdrop on suspects.
Becciu, the highest-ranking defendant, had enjoyed a stellar rise under three popes. Born in 1948 on the island of Sardinia, he grew up in the town of Pattada, famous for producing the resòlza folding-blade knife that Sardinians have worked or fought with for centuries. As a young priest, he entered the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in Rome, a training ground for the Vatican’s global network of diplomats.
St. John Paul II named Becciu a nuncio, or ambassador, to Angola, and made him an archbishop. Pope Benedict XVI picked him as the nuncio to Cuba before bringing Becciu back to Rome in 2011 to serve as Substitute for General Affairs, effectively the pope’s chief of staff.
“The substitute is, so to speak, the one who has no time for himself but must give it first to the Holy Father and therefore be willing to take any of his calls and favour any of his initiatives,” Becciu said in 2018.
While at the Secretariat of State, the Vatican’s top administrative body, Becciu was polite but reserved, not given to small talk, according to people who worked with him. In 2018, Francis raised Becciu to the rank of cardinal and made him head of the Vatican office that oversees the canonisation of saints.
“Until 6.02pm. Thursday I felt like a friend of the pope, a faithful executor of his will,” Becciu said the day after he was asked to resign. “Then the pope says he no longer has faith in me.”
This account of the case is based on court documents, testimony and interviews with people familiar with the events.
Root of all evil
Benedict shocked the church with his resignation in 2013, a reign marked in its last year by leaked documents revealing incompetence and corruption in the Vatican, especially in its finances.
The College of Cardinals, seeking a successor who would carry out extensive overhauls, elected Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first pope from outside Europe since the eighth century. At the time, the Holy See’s financial assets were spread among several institutions without central management or even common accounting standards.
The Secretariat of State managed around $700 million in financial assets, including the investment that later engulfed Becciu and other Vatican officials in scandal.
The Vatican invested $200 million in a fund managed by Raffaele Mincione, an Italian financier based in London, according to the indictment. The fund’s biggest asset was a 45 per cent stake in a commercial building in London’s upscale Chelsea neighbourhood. Mincione controlled the other 55 per cent.
Around that time, Francis made Australian Cardinal George Pell his finance chief and gave him sweeping powers. Pell unveiled new financial guidelines for the Vatican. But he clashed with the secretariat, which opposed his plans for a financial audit by an external accounting firm.
Pell considered Becciu his main opponent in the secretariat. Other Vatican officials also lobbied the pope against Pell’s changes. The pope curtailed Pell’s powers, and the external audit was canceled, a sign of how quickly cardinals could fall from Francis’s favour. Pell later returned to Australia to face child sex abuse charges. He was acquitted on appeal and died this year.
Officials at the secretariat increasingly saw the deal with Mincione as too risky and complex. Under Becciu’s successor, according to the indictment, the office exchanged through middlemen its stake in Mincione’s investment fund, plus £40 million, the equivalent of more than $50 million at the time, for full ownership of the building in Chelsea.
The building carried a £128 million mortgage. To refinance it at a lower rate, the secretariat sought a Vatican Bank loan. Bank officials were troubled by what they saw as a lack of documentation on the investment, and the bank board took its concerns to the pope.
That set off an investigation and a Vatican police raid on the secretariat. Vatican prosecutors charged five Vatican officials, including Becciu, and five outsiders with various crimes, including fraud, embezzlement, abuse of office, money laundering and extortion.
The Vatican sold the Chelsea building for about $225 million last year after putting more than $400 million into the investment.
Mincione, the financier, was charged with fraud, money laundering and embezzlement. He has denied any wrongdoing. In an interview last month, he blamed the loss on an unexpected drop in London property values after Brexit. He suggested the Vatican would have made a profit if it had held the property and carried out a planned conversion into apartments.
The secretariat has since been stripped of its financial assets, which are now managed by the Vatican Bank.
Secret tape
Becciu retained his title but lost his most important right as a cardinal, participating in a conclave to elect a future pope — as well as the potential of being elected himself.
Before Easter 2021, as Becciu and others waited for prosecutors to issue indictments in the case, Francis appeared at Becciu’s apartment to celebrate Mass with him. Many in the Vatican read the gesture as conciliatory. There was another interpretation. The Mass took place on Holy Thursday evening, when Francis customarily visits prisoners.
A week before the trial began in July that year, Becciu wrote to the pope, asking him to acknowledge in writing that he had authorised and even encouraged his steps regarding the Chelsea property.
Francis wrote back and declined, saying he found Becciu’s request surprising. The London real-estate acquisition had always puzzled him, he said.
Becciu phoned Francis three days before the trial and secretly recorded their talk. He tried to get the pope to say he had authorised the money for the operation to free the nun. “I cannot call you to court as a witness. I would never dare. But there must be a statement from you,” Becciu told the pope during the six-minute recording, which was leaked and published last year.
Francis replied that he couldn’t remember the details. He asked Becciu to put in writing what he wanted confirmed. Becciu voiced concern that Francis was being advised by someone unfavourable to him. The pope reassured him. “No, I understand,” he said.
That same day, Becciu sent the pope two declarations to sign, indicating the pope had authorised him to try to sell the Chelsea property and to spend money for the nun’s release.
The pope declined. “Evidently and surprisingly, you misunderstood me,” he wrote back.
Francis was more encouraging in an interview with Spanish Catholic radio later that summer. “I want with all my heart for him to be innocent,” he said.
Close quarters
Prosecutors charged Becciu with negligence over the London investment decisions. “There is no conduct attributed to the cardinal in which a personal economic gain can be recognised,” Becciu’s lawyers said, referring to all facets of the case.
They also charged him in other dealings. Prosecutors said Becciu sent about $135,000 in Vatican funds to his home diocese in Sardinia and alleged some of the money benefited his family. Becciu has denied wrongdoing and said the money went to charities helping the elderly and unemployed.
Prosecutors also charged Becciu regarding his relationship with Cecilia Marogna. She met Becciu in 2016 and offered her services to the secretariat as an expert on intelligence issues.
The secretariat sent Marogna €575,000 to help free a Colombian nun kidnapped by Islamist militants in Mali. Becciu’s successor at the secretariat testified that Francis had authorised the payment. Becciu said in a deposition that the pope had given him permission to spend as much as €1 million to free the nun.
Prosecutors charged Marogna with embezzlement, alleging she spent much of the money on brand-name luxury goods and costly vacations in Spain and Italy. A lawyer for Marogna denied she misspent Vatican funds. Marogna denied any wrongdoing.
Marogna visited Becciu’s residence in the Vatican several times, posting photos taken inside with such captions as “feeling at home” and “my paradise.” Italian media splashed stories about the cardinal and his lady.
Becciu’s lawyers objected when the prosecution suggested a sexual relationship between Marogna and Becciu, which they both denied.
Becciu testified that Marogna spent one night at his apartment, located in the building that houses the Vatican’s doctrinal office, once known as the Inquisition. “She stayed to talk until late,” he said, and updated him about the captive nun. Marogna slept in the quarters of the nuns who kept house for him, he said, and they met for breakfast.
During his testimony, Becciu quoted a Latin phrase from the classic Italian novel “The Betrothed,” in which a friar welcomes two women into a friary and says, omnia munda mundis — to the pure, all things are pure.
Two officials of the Vatican police testified that in late 2020 they told Becciu they had evidence Marogna had misspent some of the money that was supposed to be used to free the nun.
Becciu bent over with his head in his hands, the commander of the Vatican gendarmes testified. He recalled Becciu saying, “If this matter comes out, it will cause serious damage to me and my family.”
Becciu asked them to keep it a secret and said he would repay the funds himself, the other police official testified.
Becciu said in court that he had tried to keep the matter under wraps because the effort to free the nun “was an operation that only the Holy Father and I were aware of.” The cardinal said in a deposition that he and the pope wanted to keep the operation secret to avoid encouraging further kidnappings.
Sister Gloria Cecilia Narváez was released in Mali on Oct. 9, 2021, after being held captive for nearly five years. She met with Francis at the Vatican the next day.
“Undoubtedly, it was one of the most spiritually transformative experiences of my life,” she said this year in an interview about her confinement. “Looking back, even though it sounds paradoxical, it was perhaps one of the greatest blessings that God has given me.”
The Wall Street Journal
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