They are demanding the Catholic Church pay for damages to their reputations caused by their unceremonious sacking in 2017.

Milone (pictured with the Pope) was the Vatican's first auditor general. Panicco was his deputy.

Pope Francis appointed Milone to the auditor general's role. Milone's brief was to clean up Vatican finances and raise accounting procedures to international standards of accountability and transparency.

He and his deputy were sacked two years later by Cardinal Archbishop Angelo Becciu.

Milone says at first he had good relations with Francis, telling him "everything I found" and meeting him regularly.

But that changed in 2016. That was about the same time he requested more information from Becciu on the purchase of a London building. He suspected Francis did not receive his letters after that.

Soon after, both auditors were sacked.

Milone blames this on Becciu, who until Francis fired him in 2020 was the third-highest-ranking official at the Vatican.

Becciu masterminded "operation eject-Milone", the ousted auditor says.

When Becciu sacked Milone in 2017, he told reporters Milone "went against all the rules and was spying on the private lives of his superiors and staff, including me".

Milone denies this.

"We did the right thing, we never spied, we have been honest, we did what we had to do, but unfortunately what we had to do was very embarrassing," he says.

Meanwhile, in 2020 Pope Francis fired Becciu. He is currently one of 10 defendants at a trial in the Vatican on charges including corruption and embezzlement related to the purchase of a building in London. All of them deny any wrongdoing.

So far the Vatican has made no comment on the lawsuit, which Milone and Panicco's lawyers filed last week with the Vatican prosecutor's office.

He sees his firing as a battle between "the Middle Ages and modernity". He is calling out "the small mafia at the Vatican" that was offended by his findings of lapses in the Catholic institution's finances, including "many cases of rule violations, improper predisposition of accounting records, and incorrect registrations."

Becciu says he has nothing new to say about the Milone case, that it was the pope who ordered Milone's ousting and that he merely carried it out.

His lawyers say Milone has given "a completely unfounded reconstruction" of events in the legal filing.

Milone and Panicco's 53-page legal filing alleges that "a filter" was put up which made it difficult for Milone to reach the pope, who was the target of a "disinformation operation" by some in the Vatican.

Milone says he has proof that several Vatican offices concealed transactions or obstructed auditors' attempts to see real estate and investment portfolios. He also pointed to significant anomalies in the management of funds at the Catholic pediatric hospital Bambino Gesù.

Source

• Religion News Service
• Reuters

The Vatican prosecutor offered to remedy the mistakes by essentially starting over, throwing the trial into question before it really got off the ground.

Deputy prosecutor Alessandro Diddi made the surprise announcement at the first hearing since the trial started in July, saying: "I feel the duty to meet (the defence requests) halfway."

Diddi said his office has always acted to ensure that the rights of the accused were respected. He suggested his proposal was a "common sense" way to address the defence objections.

Defence lawyers told the court Diddi's request was unacceptable and accused Diddi's office of withholding key pieces of evidence from them.

They cited a raft of what they claimed were procedural errors and asked court president Giuseppe Pignatone to annul the 500-page indictment. This action would effectively end the current trial.

The defence maintains the errors by the Vatican prosecution badly harmed their right to a fair trial and ability to mount a defence.

In particular, they want to view videos of five interrogations of Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, a former Vatican official who was first a suspect and then a star witness for the prosecution.

Perlasca is the primary witness against the most prominent defendant, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, a once-powerful Vatican official.

The prosecution has accused Becciu, other former Vatican officials or employees and outside middlemen involved in the deal of embezzlement, abuse of office, and fraud. They all have denied wrongdoing.

The trial revolves mainly around the purchase by the Vatican's Secretariat of State of a 350 million-euro investment in a London property.

The venture lost the Vatican tens of millions of euros. Much of the funds were donations from the faithful that were spent on fees to Italian brokers.

Pignatone adjourned the trial after about two hours and said he would announce his decisions on Wednesday morning.

If Pignatone agrees to Diddi's request, he and others on the prosecution team will return to their work with thousands of pages of evidence and documents. In addition, they will question some of the defendants again and other witnesses for the first time.

Sources

AP News

Reuters

The Vatican's trial against Cardinal Angelo Becciu and nine other individuals, along with three corporate entities, alleges extortion, fraud and embezzlement, money laundering and abuse of office.

This is the first time a cardinal has been brought to trial by a civil court on penal charges in the Vatican.

Earlier in the year, Pope Francis issued a decree enabling cardinals and bishops to stand trial before a Vatican civil tribunal. Until then, they had immunity.

Most of this trial's charges stem from a Vatican investigation into how the Vatican Secretariat of State used $200 million to finance a property development project in London's expensive Chelsea district, incurring millions in debt.

The Secretariat's allegedly criminal asset management included using donations from the "Peter's Pence" annual collection.

However, for much of the day's proceedings, it was not Becciu or any of his co-defendants who seemed to be on trial.

Rather, in turn, defence attorneys did their best to portray the Vatican's judicial authority as antiquated and authoritarian.

Lawyers for the lay defendants who chose not to attend the day's session presented a wide array of objections to the trial, mainly lamenting the lack of documentation given to the defence before it began.

Italian broker, Raffaele Mincione was not present at the Vatican civil court trial as he has taken a case against the Vatican in London High Court.

His lawyers said Mincione does not recognize the Vatican as the proper place for his trial.

It was through Mincione that the Secretariat invested in his Athena Capital Fund to purchase his Chelsea property.

The second Italian broker, Gianluigi Torzi, could not attend because he is under house arrest in London.

Torzi faces extradition to Italy and risks arrest if he enters the country.

Also not present was Cecilia Marogna, who at one point, and on behalf of Becciu, carried out intelligence work to help liberate kidnapped missionaries.

Marogna is charged with embezzlement after a large portion of the 500,000 Euros she was paid was spent on luxury goods.

This left Becciu and Monsignor Mauro Carlino, his former personal secretary, as the only two defendants present during Tuesday's hearing.

At the end of the day's proceedings, Becciu reiterated his innocence to journalists.

"I have always been obedient to the pope".

"He has entrusted me with many missions in my life, he wanted me to come to trial and I am coming to trial.

"I am serene, my conscience is clear, I have the confidence that the judges will see the facts correctly and my great hope is certainty that they will recognize my innocence."

As a counter, Becciu says he has ordered his lawyers to file two lawsuits for defamation.

The first is against Msgr Alberto Perlasca, the Secretariat of State's former administrative office chief, who was an initial suspect back in 2020 and the other against and Francesca Chaouqui.

Chaouqui was found guilty in 2016 of leaking confidential documents about Vatican finances. She was given a 10-month suspended sentence.

The Trial was adjourned until October 5.

Source

• America Magazine
• NCR Online
• Crux Now

The March 12 circular was written on the letterhead of the Vatican Secretariat of State and carried the initials of its No. 2, Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra.

It immediately raised questions, given the implication that it was an effort to limit the celebration of the Latin Mass favored by traditionalist Catholics who have expressed hostility to Pope Francis.

Read More

This follows a major shake-up of authority among Vatican offices after a series of financial scandals that included the unusual resignation of a cardinal in September.

In an Aug. 25 letter, made public by the Vatican Nov. 5, Francis informed Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the prefect of the secretariat, that he shall transfer management and administration of all its funds to the office in charge of administering properties owned by the Vatican.

That office, known as the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), is also directed to disinvest "as soon as possible" from the Vatican's controversial part in a development project in London.

Read More

Becciu, a former top Vatican official was fired last month by Pope Francis, who accused him of embezzlement and nepotism. Becciu has denied all wrongdoing.

Cecilia Marogna (39) was arrested in Milan under an international warrant issued by a Vatican magistrates.

A senior Vatican source says Holy See magistrates suspect Marogna of embezzlement and aggravated misappropriation in complicity with others.

Recent Italian newspaper reports say Becciu used his senior position at the Vatican Secretariat of State to pass hundreds of thousands of euros in Holy See funds to Marogna's Slovenian-based consulting firm, purportedly for humanitarian operations in Africa and Asia.

Marogna is not denying she had received 500,000 euros ($587,350) over a four-year period from Becciu.

Exactly what the money was used for is still being investigated.

In one report Marogna says it was used to run a "parallel diplomacy" to help missionaries in conflict zones.

She says the money was used as compensation, travel reimbursements and consultancy fees as well as some luxury expenditures.

Using her purchases of designer handbags as an example, she says they were purchased "maybe for the wife of a Nigerian friend who was in a position to talk to the president of Burkina Faso."

Marogna's work for the Vatican Secretariat of State was not previously known.

It is not yet known what charges Marogna could face if she was merely on the receiving end of consulting fees approved by Becciu.

He had been given broad discretionary authority to manage the Secretariat of State's assets by his senior at the Secretariat, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.

Becciu's lawyer says his client knew Marogna but his dealings with her had been "exclusively about institutional matters."

The sacked cardinal has also been caught up in another Vatican financial scandal revolving around the use of Church money to invest in a luxury building in London.

Last year, L'Espresso linked the cardinal to a shady investment in high-end London real estate.

The Vatican allegedly paid over US$200 million into the venture — mostly from donations from Catholic faithful. In the meanwhile, middlemen allegedly pocketed tens of millions in fees. Five Vatican employees were subsequently suspended.

Becciu has denied all wrongdoing in the deal and defended the purchase, saying the property has increased in value.

Source

• Reuters
• Business Insider
• NPR
• Image:Stuff

The investigation is probing the secretariat official's appointment as a director of a company owned by the financier who brokered the deal for a London luxury apartment building.

Vatican prosecutors are also continuing to look into suspicious financial transactions and investments at the Vatican Secretariat of State.

The secretariat official being investigated is one of five Vatican employees suspended in October 2019 after Vatican gendarmes raided the secretariat, seizing computers and documents related to financial dealings .

The official has not returned to work and it is not clear if he is still employed.

On 30 April the Holy See press office confirmed "individual measures" had been taken against some employees in relation to the ongoing investigations, but did not specify what that might mean.

The luxury apartment building is at the center of the secretariat's investments and financial transactions Vatican prosecutors are scrutinising.

The building was purchased in stages between 2014-2018 from Italian businessman Raffaele Mincione. At that time, Mincione was managing hundreds of millions of euros of secretariat funds.

When Minicone's holding company sold the secretariat 30,000 of 31,000 shares in the 60 Sloane Avenue, London building project, it retained the 1,000 voting shares it needed to control the holding company which owned the building.

Mincione eventually offered to part with those, at greatly inflated prices.

To complete the sale, the Secretariat of State enlisted the help of another businessman, Gianluigi Torzi.

Torzi, who acted as a commission-earning middleman for the purchase of the remaining shares, earned 10 million euros for his role in the deal.

Although the Catholic News Agency has questioned the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, about the deal and the secretariat's involvement, he has not responded.

he was specifically asked if he was aware of the appointment, and whether he considered it appropriate for an official at the secretariat to accept such a position. he was also asked if officials at the secretariat are generally permitted to accept such positions.

Cardinal Parolin did not respond by the time of publication.

Gianluigi Torzi also has connections with British-Italian architect, Luciano Capaldo, who is the director of a U.K. registered holding company owned by the Secretariat of State, which controls the Sloane Avenue property.

Capaldo has previously served as a director of several companies at which Torzi has also served as a director.

After several directors were appointed and removed by the secretariat in 2019, Capaldo is now the sole director of the property.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Pinterest

In a statement sent to journalists April 30, Holy See press officer Matteo Bruni said that in response to "some questions from journalists," he could confirm "that individual measures had been arranged for some employees of the Holy See, at the expiry of those adopted at the beginning of the investigation of financial and real estate investments of the Secretariat of State."

The release confirms that a months-long Vatican investigation is ongoing, which aims to dig into complicated financial transactions and investments made by officials at the secretariat over a period of years. Read more

Nearly a month after private documents about a property deal involving the Vatican leaked to the press, Becciu explained his side of the story.

The Peter's Pence collection "is not only for the pope's charity but also for the sustenance of his pastoral ministry," he said.

Accusations abut his misuse of the fund for investments instead of direct aid to the poor are "muddy accusations that I firmly and disdainfully reject," he said.

"I have a clear conscience and I know that I have always acted in the interest of the Holy See and never in my personal interest. Those who know me closely can attest to that."

Stories about Becciu's involvement in investment in a property in London have been circulating for the past month, after the Vatican police raided offices in the Secretariat of State and its financial oversight office on 1 October.

On 2 October, Italian magazine L'Espresso published what it claimed to be an internal notice from the Vatican police about the "cautionary suspension" of five individuals.

Those individuals included Tomasso Di Ruzza, who is the director of the Financial Intelligence Authority (AIF).

L'Espresso said the raid was part of a Vatican investigation into how the Secretariat of State used $200 million to finance a property development project in the Chelsea district of London in 2014.

However, a fortnight ago, the Vatican said an internal investigation revealed that neither Di Ruzza "nor any other employee of AIF improperly exercised his authority or engaged in any other wrongdoing."

Becciu served as substitute secretary for general affairs in the Vatican Secretariat of State from 2011 to 2018.

According to the leaked documents, the Vatican Secretariat of State eventually purchased a majority stake in the London property in 2018 and incurred debts from the failed project.

The Vatican press office has not made any comments about L'Espresso's report. Nor has the Vatican press office clarified the nature of the alleged financial transactions or people being investigated.

However, last week Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who is the Vatican secretary of state, said while Peter's Pence is administered well, the London property investment was opaque - a description Becciu questions.

The Peter's Pence website shows it collects donations from a world-wide collection taken at the end of June each year.

The money is then used to "sustain the work of evangelization and, at the same time, to help the poor in whatever way is possible."

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Zenit