Vatican money used for private purposes: among those under investigation are Cardinal Becciu’s brother and the bishop of Ozieri

The Sassari prosecutor’s office has closed the investigation into money laundering and embezzlement: suspects Antonino Becciubrother of the cardinal Angelo Becciu, as manager of the Spes social cooperative, the bishop of Ozieri Corrado Melisand seven other people.

According to the accusation, the suspects would have channeled funds of 8 per thousand intended for the Diocese of Ozieri into the current accounts of the Spes cooperative. The documents of the prosecutor’s office speak of a total sum equal to over 2 million euros which arrived at the disposal of Spes in the period between January 2013 and February 2023.

“We will clarify the positions of the suspects”

The news, anticipated by Tg1was confirmed atAnsa. According to the hypotheses of the Prosecutor’s Office, the diocese of Ozieri would have in fact been in the hands of Antonino Becciu. The brother of the cardinal of Pattada would also have opened an account in the name of Caritas from which he would have withdrawn funds for his cooperative, Spes. The director of Caritas, Don Mario Curzuthe partner of Antonino Becciu, Giovanna Pani, and the daughter of the latter. There are nine suspects in total. The lawyer of all the suspects, Ivan Iaicommented: “We have been aware of the investigation by the Sassari Prosecutor’s Office for some time and now, at its conclusion, we have finally been given the opportunity to clarify the positions of all the people involved. We would have preferred confidentiality regarding the facts – specified the legal -, around which an adversarial discussion will be necessary in compliance with the guarantees of the people, currently only under investigation, so that they can defend themselves from the challenges raised by the public prosecution”.

The trial in the Vatican

The affair intersected with the trial against Cardinal Becciu which took place in the Vatican, and which ended with the first degree conviction of the cardinal (5 years and six months) and almost all the other defendants. If at the center of that proceeding there was the sale-fraud of a building in the center of London with funds from the Vatican Secretariat of State, decided at the time in which Becciu was Deputy for General Affairs, one of the secondary strands concerned financing which started from the Secretariat of State – not, therefore, from the eight per thousand funds – and ended up in the same Spes cooperative. The declared objective was the construction of a social oven. Cardinal Antonino’s brother, summoned as a witness in the Vatican courtroom by the president Giuseppe Pignatone, refused to appear. In the context of that investigation, the Financial Police of Sassari carried out searches which revealed, among other things, the recording of a telephone call with the Pope made by Becciu without Francis’ knowledge and the usual relationships between the cardinal’s family and Cecilia Marogna, in turn condemned by the Vatican. Also in that context, it emerged that the Sassari court had sent a letter rogatory to the Vatican justice system. The cardinal and the other defendants, as well as some of the civil parties, appealed the first instance sentence. After the Vatican tribunal publishes the reasons for the sentence, predictably not before the end of the year, the appeal process will begin.