Vatican supreme court blocks prosecutor’s appeal in Becciu case
The court also recognized Alessadro Diddi's decision to recuse himself from the appeal process.
In a decision released Monday, Vatican City’s highest appellate has rejected an appeal from the Vatican City’s chief prosecutor in the sprawling financial crimes trial that concluded at the Vatican more than two years ago.
The decision heaps further pressure on the embattled promoter of justice, Alessandro Diddi, who has recused himself from the appeal process. It also means that future appeal hearings at the Vatican will only consider efforts to reduce the charges and sentences against convicted defendants like Cardinal Angelo Becciu.
The decision was released Jan. 12 by the court and publicized by the Holy See press office.
The appeal, brought by the Vatican City’s promoter of justice, Alessandro Diddi, sought to reopen the prosecution of the case, which was concluded in December of 2023 and resulted in the conviction of nine individuals, including Cardinal Angelo Becciu, in a sprawling financial crimes trial.
While the various defendants filed appeals against their convictions — appeals which remain pending — Diddi, who led the prosecution of the case, also sought a new hearing of the case after judges dismissed his thesis — that instances of corruption and other financial crimes were unified in a single operative conspiracy among the defendants.
A decision rejecting the prosecutor’s appeal, first reported by Vatican journalist Maria Antonietta Calabrò, was signed Jan. 9 by the judges of the Court of Cassation and released Monday.
The five-judge panel, which consists of three cardinals and two expert lay associate justices, concluded that Diddi’s appeal — already rejected by a lower appellate court — “completely falls outside the scope of the notion” of a procedurally correct appeal, and “is divorced from the entire procedural system.”
The decision, which confirms a similar rejection from the ordinary court of appeal for Vatican City, means that the convictions of the nine defendants assigned years in prison and millions of euros in penalties, will now be examined based on the defendants’ appeals, and without the possibility of further charges or sentences being added.
The Court of Cassation also accepted and recognized a filing from Diddi’s office in which the city state’s chief prosecutor recused himself from the appellate process. Diddi’s prosecutorial strategy and conduct have been the subject of consistent scrutiny and objections throughout the case.
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Despite the prosecution securing convictions against nine of the 10 defendants in the initial trial phase, Diddi’s office appealed the final verdict after judges broadly dismissed the prosecution’s central thesis of a single unified criminal conspiracy among the defendants.
Instead, the judges at first instance found what they called “complete and irrefutable” evidence of criminal wrongdoing across a range of either loosely connected or separate allegations among the defendants.
During initial appeal hearings in September, lawyers for the defendants demanded Diddi recuse himself from the process following the publication of a cache of text messages between two women accused of coaching Perlasca.
The exchanges between Genoveffa Ciferri and Francesca Chaouqui show them discussing the cooperation of Perlasca with Vatican investigators. Perlasca was, for years, the head of the administrative office of the Secretariat of State and a chief deputy of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the star defendant in the trial.
Perlasca’s decision to cooperate with prosecutors led to some of the most headline-grabbing accusations against Becciu before and during the trial, during which the priest also claimed that Chaouqui — through Ciferri, a personal friend of Perlasca — had unwittingly encouraged him to cooperate with prosecutors.
Chaouqui’s involvement in the case made headlines and caused a stir in court, since she was at the center of the last Vatican financial scandal and trial, and convicted in 2016 of leaking classified Vatican information in the so-called “Vatileaks 2.0” scandal and has a longstanding public feud with Cardinal Becciu.
Cardinal Becciu maintains the exchanges prove attempts by the prosecution to frame him and taint the investigation and trial. However, judges during the original trial ruled that Perlasca’s testimony was peripheral to the case, and Becciu’s conviction on multiple counts of financial crimes and corruption was supported by clear documentary evidence presented in court.
Cardinal Becciu, the first cardinal to be tried as an ordinary defendant in the city state’s court following judicial reforms by Pope Francis in 2021, was sentenced to five and half years in prison in 2023.
He has insisted he is the victim of a conspiracy to frame him and maintained that his funneling of hundreds of thousands of euros to members of his own family did not benefit either his family or himself — though members of the cardinal’s family have faced separate indictment by Italian authorities over the same allegations.
Becciu has also insisted that some half a million euros paid to a self-described private secret agent, Cecelia Marogna, were approved personally by Pope Francis — though the late pope denied any such approval in a phone call with Becciu secretly recorded by the cardinal.
In a letter to Becciu, Francis suggested the money went “to satisfy personal voluptuous inclinations” of Marogna, who was found to have spent the funds on luxury goods and travel.
Among other convictions likely to come under close judicial scrutiny on appeal is the case of Raffaele Mincione, whom the Secretariat of State used as an investment manager for 200 million euros of high interest loans taken out from Swiss banks, and from whom the Secretariat of State later purchased the London building at Sloane Avenue after separating from Mincione.
Mincione was convicted by the Vatican City court of embezzlement — charges he has vigorously denied.
In a lengthy interview with The Pillar, Mincione 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.
The Vatican City court ruled that he was legally culpable as the beneficiary of embezzled funds — Vatican money being used for illegal purposes by Becciu — and should have, as a matter of professional due diligence, sufficiently familiarized himself with Vatican City law and realized he was participating in an illegal operation.
Mincione, for his part, has insisted that he signed contracts which were legal under the jurisdictions under which he was operating.
Prior to the filing of criminal charges against him in Vatican City, he filed a lawsuit in the UK seeking a court judgment that he acted in good faith in his dealings with the Vatican — including a 2018 separation agreement which transferred ownership of the London building at 60 Sloane Avenue to the Secretariat of State’s designated proxy, Mr. Gianluigi Torzi, who was also convicted of financial crimes in the case.
Judges in the UK court found that Mincione and his companies “have the benefit of a number of findings in this judgment… which reject very serious allegations levelled against them… including particular allegations of dishonesty and particular allegations of conspiracy.”
The UK court found that the Vatican also “had reason to consider itself utterly let down in its experience with [Mincione and his companies]. [They] made no attempt to protect the [Vatican] from fraudulent bad actors. They took no care towards the [Vatican] and they put their own interests first.”
However, Mincone and his lawyers noted at the time of the decision that these findings concerned the period after the Vatican had initiated a separation from Mincione, after which he “had no obligation whatsoever” to look out for the Vatican’s interests against the actions of other parties.
In addition to facing a five-year prison sentence in Vatican City, Mincione has in the past noted that he has the most substantial assets of all of the nine convicted defendants and, as party to a combined liability set by the Vatican City court, is being held responsible for meeting the bulk of the hundreds of millions of euros ordered to be forfeited by the judgement.
Speaking to The Pillar in February, Mincione said that “In the Vatican, even today, nobody is looking for the truth. Everybody is after revenge.”
"To satisfy personal voluptuous inclinations." What a turn of phrase.