The Vatican’s suspicious investment in luxury real estate in London was probably higher than previously known. The British daily The Financial Times reported on Tuesday another purchase worth 100 million pounds (2.98 billion crowns). Influential Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu resigned last week over a scandal surrounding controversial acquisitions in the UK capital.
The church state now plans to reform its economy, the DPA reported, referring to the Italian media. The Vatican did not comment on the findings. According to documents available to France Télécom, Becciu was involved in investing Vatican funds in the purchase of luxury apartments in Knightsbridge, one of the most expensive residential areas in London.
Earlier, the media reported that 72-year-old Becciu, as the top representative of the Vatican bureaucracy, also approved the purchase of part of a building in another London district of Chelsea, for $ 200 million (CZK 4.7 billion). Becciu denied any wrongdoing in connection with the said financial operations.
Several Vatican staff were fired last year to investigate a suspicious transaction that allegedly caused extensive financial losses to the church, and Tommaso di Ruzza, head of the board of the Vatican’s Financial Flow Control Office (AIF), was fired. Domenico Giani, longtime commander of the Vatican Guard and chief bodyguard of Pope Francis, also resigned.
According to the DPA, Vatican financial flows are often subject to insufficient control. At the beginning of the week, the Italian media stated that Pope Francis wanted to restore order to the finances of the church state immediately. In particular, the Apostolic Residence Property Administration (APSA) should be strengthened, La Repubblica wrote on Monday.
The head of APSA, Bishop Nunzio Galantino, said today in the Corriere della Sera that the restructuring of the administration of church property “had been going on for some time”. “It was not the investigation of the London building or the affair around Cardinal Becciu that forced the need for economic reform,” Galantino said. According to him, the pope demands transparency and, if possible, “a single center for expenditure and investment”.
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