In all, the Vatican's head prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi, asked that the trial's 10 defendants serve a cumulative 73 years and one month in prison.

None of the defendants has been found guilty by the Vatican tribunal, which will continue to hear closing arguments this week. The judges have until December to make a ruling on innocence or guilt and issue a sentence.

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Australian Cardinal George Pell has accused Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu of providing "incomplete" information during his testimony and thwarting transparency efforts.

In a May 6 statement, Pell accused Becciu of using his previous role as a top papal aide to block audits of the Vatican Secretariat of State's finances and to intimidate, bully and fire the auditors themselves.

Becciu, along with nine others, is currently on trial for alleged financial crimes centred on a real estate deal in London that lost the Vatican around $200 million.

Becciu served as the sostituto of the Vatican Secretariat of State from 2011-2018. This placed him as a top papal aide, akin to a chief of staff. He oversaw the London deal at its inception and is accused of embezzlement and abuse of office.

Becciu denied the charges against him, insisting: "All of the accusations are totally unfounded."

Cardinal Pell, 80, served until 2017 as head of the Vatican Secretariat of the Economy, created in 2014 at the beginning of Pope Francis's financial reform. At that point, he took leave of his role to respond to allegations of historical sexual abuse of a minor in Australia.

After a hung jury in 2018, Pell was found guilty in a retrial four months later. But, in 2020, he was acquitted on appeal by Australia's High Court, having served a year in jail.

Pell, in his letter, said Becciu, in his testimony, "gave a spirited defence of his blameless subordinate role in the Vatican finances," but that the information provided was "incomplete."

Becciu "did not explain the Secretariat of State's rejection of the papally approved supervisory role of the new Council and Secretariat for the Economy" during his tenure as sostituto, Pell said.

Pell also pointed to the firing of auditing firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) and the ousting of the Vatican's General Auditor, Libero Milone, as two unexplained actions for which Becciu was responsible.

The rivalry between Pell and Becciu dates back to nearly the beginning of Pope Francis's papacy, when Pell was personally tapped by the pope to lead the Vatican's financial reform.

Pell has often voiced public suspicion that Becciu had a hand in the sexual allegations against him. He has suggested that money transfers from the Vatican to Australia made on Becciu's watch were used as a payout to worsen his own legal trouble.

Becciu has denied using the money to influence Pell's legal proceedings. Instead, he argued the payments were made to the Australian branch of Neustar, a technology company providing internet information and analytics.

However, Pell wrote that while some of the payments are explained by contractual obligations and routine management, questions remain.

He specifically highlighted four payments made between 2017 and 2018, amounting to the $1.6 million authorised by Becciu, asking "What was the purpose? Where did the money go after Neustar?"

In several interviews, Cardinal Pell had publicly asked Becciu to end the media speculation about the payments. Becciu has refused to do so, calling Pell's questions "offensive to [his] personal dignity" and insisting that the subject was "high, demanding, and certainly confidential."

"Doubts, of course, are removed by facts, by evidence, not assertions," Cardinal Pell said. "Let us see. Truth is the daughter of time," he concluded.

Sources

Crux Now

The Australian

CathNews New Zealand

From the start of the trial in July, attorneys for the 10 defendants in the case have lamented that evidence, including 53 DVDs of interrogations and wiretaps, gathered by investigators had not been turned over to the defence. In an earlier proceeding, the Vatican judges ordered that the entirety of the material be handed over by Nov 3 while disallowing other parts of the prosecutors' case.

On Wednesday, the defence said the Vatican prosecutors had not released a transcript of investigators' interview with Francis, who in Dec 2018 had a brief meeting at the Vatican with Gianluigi Torzi, the Italian broker who helped the Vatican complete the purchase of a luxury London apartment house. The deal eventually lost the Vatican some $200 million after Torzi allegedly charged the church exorbitantly for his interest in the company that owned the property.

A month earlier, Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, a former official at the Vatican Secretariat of State, had met with Torzi in London to sign two contracts with him. According to prosecutors, the documents were signed "before the issue was brought to the attention of the Secretary of State and the Holy Father."

The contracts gave Torzi 1,000 voting shares in the fund that owned the property. He later asked the Vatican to pay him roughly $17 million to relinquish the shares, an act that Vatican prosecutors now label as extortion.

Initially a suspect of the investigation, Perlasca later offered himself as a witness but prosecutors have not made his role in the trial clear.

While interrogating Perlasca on the contracts he signed and the pope's meeting with Torzi prosecutors referred to their interview with Francis, according to the defence. In a recording of Perlasca's interrogation that the defence played in court, the Vatican prosecutor can be heard saying that they "went to the Holy Father and asked him what happened."

"Monsignor Perlasca was confronted with the declarations made by the Holy Father," said Luigi Pannella, a lawyer for Enrico Crasso, a defendant who managed a significant portion of the Vatican's financial portfolio and is accused of money laundering, extortion and corruption.

According to Pannella, mention of the pope's statement led Perlasca, who "is a priest and tied to the Holy Father by a sacred relationship of obedience and subordination," to change his testimony. Lifting his laptop showing the recording above his head, the lawyer told the judges that Perlasca's face showed "supreme disconcertment" and "shock" upon hearing that his testimony differed from that of the pope.

Vatican prosecutor Alessandro Diddi denied that the pope's words had an effect on the case or Perlasca. "This office never heard the Holy Father on the record," Diddi said, charging that the monsignor was not shocked at the prospect of what the pope said, but "instead he paled when this office was able to refute his statement through documentation."

The prosecutor added that some of the material requested by the defence is still missing because it's part of ongoing investigations unconnected to the trial.

But since Francis was mentioned in Perlasca's interrogation, the defence teams insisted that the transcript of the pope's comments be added to the evidence. "The fact that these declarations by the Holy Father are missing in the data undermines the rights of defence," Panella said.

Throughout the trial, defence lawyers have tried to capitalize on the prosecution's withholding of evidence and what they say is a lack of due process, with some likening the trial to a kangaroo court.

The trial is a key turning point in Francis' attempts to clean up the Vatican's finances and introduce corporate standards of transparency. It is also the first time in memory that a cardinal of the church has been put on trial. Cardinal Angelo Becciu, once the third-highest-ranking prelate in the Vatican, is accused of corruption, money laundering and mishandling the institution's funds, including those collected for the pope's charitable works.

It was Becciu's lawyer, Fabio Viglione, who initially led the charge in Wednesday's proceedings, saying evidence handed over by the prosecutors is incomplete and, in some points, redacted. Viglione called the omissions "a mutilation of the evidence."

"The issue here remains the same," Viglione said. "We want to defend ourselves, and we want all the data and what we need to establish an effective defence." According to the lawyer, the persistent reluctance by prosecutors to relinquish the entirety of the evidence implies the "irreparable nullity" of the trial.

The Vatican judges decided to take time to reflect on the demands made by the defence lawyers and adjourned the trial to Dec 1.

First published By Claire Giangravé , Religion News Service

Republished with permission

Sources

Religion News Service

Reuters