UK court orders Vatican to pay Mincione millions in legal costs

The High Court of England and Wales ordered the Secretariat of State to make immediate payments of $2 million

The High Court of England and Wales has ordered the Vatican Secretariat of State to pay millions of dollars in legal fees to Raffaele Mincione, the investment manager who sold the Vatican the building at the center of the London property scandal.

Raffaele Mincione. Pillar file photo.

In a judgement handed down May 2, the Secretariat of State was ordered to pay half the legal expenses, which totaled more than $9 million, incurred by Mincione and his investment company WRM during a lawsuit that concluded earlier this year over their business dealings with the Vatican.

The court ruling ordered the Secretariat of State to make an immediate payment of $2 million within weeks, with further payments to be made following detailed assessment of expenses.

The court order would appear to settle Mincione as the ultimate victor in the protracted legal battle, which has played out in the High Court since 2020.

While there is no Secretary of State during the papal interregnum, following the death of Pope Francis on April 21, the position was previously held by Cardinal Peitro Parolin, widely considered to be a leading contender for election to the papacy.

The Friday court order could draw the attention of the conclave to the years-long financial scandals which plagued the cardinal’s tenure in office.

It could also have consequences for Mincione’s pending appeal case in Vatican City, where he is seeking to overturn a 2023 conviction for participating in the illegal misappropriation of Vatican funds in a deal which placed some 200 million euros under the investment manager’s control on the Secretariat of State’s behalf.

In a statement to press on Friday, Mincione said that he is “grateful that the English judge has awarded us millions of pounds in legal costs, reflecting the true winners and losers of this sorry case.”

“The Vatican trial was originally an attempt to deflect attention from its own incompetence,” Mincione said, “but it quickly became a witch hunt mounted by a prosecutor who lied on many different occasions during the trial and hijacked justice.”

The Vatican has yet to issue a comment on the ruling, however following the death of Pope Francis on April 21, the leadership of most curial departments lapses.

The London ruling on Friday followed a verdict in February, which cleared Mincione and his companies of accusations of conspiracy and fraud made by the secretariat, while also ruling they “fell below the standards of communication with the State that could be described as good faith conduct” in their dealings with the Vatican after they terminated their investments with him.

Mincione brought the lawsuit against the Secretariat of State in 2020, in the wake of the secretariat’s severing ties with his investment company in 2018, purchasing a London building development project from his companies as part of the deal, and prior to charges being brought against him in Vatican City.

In a lengthy interview with The Pillar, Mincione previously said that he had abided by the contract he signed with the secretariat, and that investments he made — branded “speculative” and “self interested” by the Vatican — were well within the discretion granted to him by the contracts.

Mincione managed hundreds of millions of euros in Vatican funds from 2013 until 2018, when the Secretariat of State parted ways with Mincione’s investment fund, forfeiting the balance of its investment with the businessman, while paying millions in penalties for early withdrawal of their investment, receiving in exchange for ownership of a London property development.

In testimony given during the lawsuit, various questionable business and accounting practices at the Vatican’s principal governing department were also laid bare.

The sostituto at the Secretariat of State, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, at one point admitted to signing off on a five million euro invoice he knew to be “completely fictitious” and told lawyers: “You said that I was not honest. I accept that.”

While the substance of the London’s lawsuit concerns Mincione’s dealings with the Secretariat of State, much of the evidence and testimony in court concerned the actions of Gianluigiu Torzi — another businessman convicted in the Vatican financial crimes trial — who was appointed by the Vatican to act as its agent over the separation from Mincione and the acquisition of the London building at 60 Sloane Ave.

Hired in 2018 by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State to manage its acquisition of the building at 60 Sloane Ave. from Mincione, Torzi structured the deal so that his Luxembourg-registered holding company would take ownership of the building, and he would then convey ownership of the holding company to the Vatican.

Instead, after taking ownership of the building, Torzi restructured the shares of the holding company, passing 30,000 ordinary shares to the Secretariat of State while retaining 3,000 preferential shares for himself that left him in total control of the company and therefore the building.

Prosecutors have argued in Vatican court that Torzi extorted the Holy See for millions for control of the company and with Mincione’s cooperation and conspired to defraud the Secretariat of State over the purchase of the building — and secured convictions in Vatican City court on those charges.

While acknowledging a complicated series of personal business dealings with Torzi, Mincione has denied any criminal action on his part or coordination with Torzi.

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News of the London court order is likely to renew focus on Vatican financial scandals in Rome, where the College of Cardinals is currently meeting ahead of a papal election conclave which will begin on May 7.

The news will likely draw particular attention to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State under Pope Francis, and whose department became the locus of a series of financial scandals over the last decade.

Parolin himself became a central figure in the scandal, after it emerged he was involved directly in efforts to force the Institute for Works of Religion, the Vatican’s for-profit bank, to lend his department some 150 million euros to pay off a mortgage on the controversial London building.

Cardinal Parolin wrote directly to the bank’s president, pressuring him to support the application which, he said, represented high-priority “needs of the Holy See.”

When the loan was rejected by the bank, secretariat officials have said they ordered extralegal retaliatory action against its president and directors.

After being similarly pressured by Vatican financial watchdogs to approve the loan application, which was considered incomplete and an unsound investment, the bank’s leadership flagged the matter to Vatican prosecutors and to Pope Francis, kicking off a years-long criminal investigation and trial.