After two and a half years and 85 hearings of an unusual process that has shaken the foundations of the Holy See, the Vatican City State Court issued its ruling this Saturday in the case motivated by the purchase and sale of a building in a luxurious neighborhood of London with funds from the Secretary of State, a fraudulent operation in which the Catholic Church lost more than 130 million euros. The sentence highlights the sentence to five and a half years in prison for embezzlement of funds for the Italian cardinal Angelo Becciu, 75 years old, who will also have to pay an 8,000 euro fine and is disqualified for life from holding public office in the Holy See. Campus.
Becciu's lawyers, the first cardinal to be convicted by the Vatican courts, have already announced that they will appeal the ruling, considering that he is innocent as he is the victim of a “machination” against him. The Prosecutor's Office requested 7 years and three months in prison for him, where it is not clear that he will enter even if the conviction is confirmed in the second instance. Although the Vatican has a cell in the Gendarmerie facilities, where Spanish Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda was held for the leak of documents in the scandal known as 'Vatileaks 2', it does not rule out that Pope Francis, as the highest Vatican judicial authority , ended up granting grace to the cardinal.
The ruinous real estate investment in the exclusive London neighborhood of Chelsea with funds that, in part, should have been spent on charity, took place when Becciu was a substitute Secretary of State, a key position in the internal functioning of the Roman Curia and which he held between 2011 and 2018. His influence was such that in some ecclesiastical circles his name was considered, until his fall from grace, as 'papable' in case of having to choose a successor for Pope Francis.
Along with the once powerful cardinal, from whom Jorge Mario Bergoglio had already withdrawn his rights to participate in a conclave, the Vatican Court convicted eight other defendants, among whom the name of Fabrizio Tirabassi, an employee of the Administrative Office of the Secretariat of Vatican state, which received seven and a half years in prison. Several financial intermediaries were also considered guilty, as well as Cecilia Marogna, a supposed expert in security and international relations to whom Becciu turned for secret operations in which she preferred that Vatican diplomacy not be openly involved. Marogna was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison. The culprits will also have to compensate the Vatican for the damage caused with a total of 200 million euros.
This historic ruling comes one day before Bergoglio turns 87, who in his almost 11 years of pontificate has tried to carry out a profound reform of Vatican finances with the aim of achieving greater transparency and professionalism, so that repeat scandals such as the fraudulent purchase of the building in London.
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