Archbishop Carlo Viganò has been ordered to refund US$2 million plus interest and court costs to his brother Fr Lorenzo Viganò.
Lorenzo had taken out a civil lawsuit opposing his brother’s management of a “conspicuous family inheritance.”
The ruling was issued by Judge Susanna Terni after hearing the case in the civil tribunal of Milan in mid-October, although the ruling has only just been made known.
The Italian press says the archbishop “illegally and illegitimately” took the money from his brother over many years.
Evidently, the siblings inherited a sizable fortune from their father, a steel industrialist in Milan, who died in 1961.
They decided to keep their part of the inheritance “in common” and agreed that Carlo Maria would manage it.
In 2011 Lorenzo told an Italian daily he had “trusted him [his brother] blindly,” until his brother’s actions seeking to take total control of his part of the finances caused him to resort to legal action and demand the division of their inheritance.
The court in Milan found that, by September 2010, the brothers’ inheritance included several units of real estate valued at around US$23 million, plus a sum of money of around US$7 million.
Much of the money was held in a bank in Switzerland. The court concluded that the archbishop had benefited from the real estate, keeping about US$4 million he should have shared with his brother.
This is the second time the archbishop has made headlines around the world. In August his accusations that Pope Francis covered up the abuse of the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick and calls for Francis to resign provoked an international media frenzy.
Source
- La Stampa
- America Magazine
- Image: Crux Now