Vatican prosecutor appeals verdict that largely dismantled his fraud case however convicted cardinal

VATICAN CITY (AP) – The Vatican’s chief prosecutor has appealed a court docket verdict that largely dismantled his idea of a grand conspiracy to defraud the Holy See of hundreds of thousands of euros however discovered a cardinal responsible of embezzlement.

Prosecutor Alessandro Diddi filed his attraction earlier this week, days after the three-judge tribunal issued its verdict in a sophisticated monetary trial that aired the Vatican’s soiled laundry and examined the peculiar authorized system in an absolute monarchy within the middle of Europe.

While the headline from Saturday’s verdict targeted on Cardinal Angelo Becciu’s 5 ½-year sentence for embezzlement, the meat of the ruling made clear that the judges rejected most of Diddi’s 487-page indictment. Diddi had accused Becciu and 9 different folks of dozens of counts of fraud, embezzlement, cash laundering, extortion, corruption, abuse of workplace and witness tampering in reference to the Vatican’s bungled funding in a London property.

He had sought jail phrases of as much as 13 years apiece and 400 million euros in restitution. In the top, the tribunal headed by Judge Giuseppe Pignatone acquitted one of many defendants totally and convicted the others of just a few of the costs they confronted, whereas nonetheless ordering them to pay some 366 million euros in restitution.

In the Vatican, as in Italy, prosecutors can attraction verdicts concurrently defendants. Unlike Italy, each side should file appeals even earlier than the trial decide points his written motivations explaining the verdicts, although they’ll amend them, attorneys stated.

In this case, Diddi filed a three-page movement on Dec. 19 asking the Vatican appeals court docket to convict every defendant for the total set of expenses that he initially laid out, though the tribunal dominated that most of the alleged crimes merely didn’t happen.

The principal focus of the trial concerned the Holy See’s 350 million euro funding in changing a former Harrod’s warehouse into luxurious flats. Diddi alleged brokers and Vatican monsignors fleeced the Holy See of tens of hundreds of thousands of euros in charges and commissions, after which extorted the Holy See for 15 million euros ($16.5 million) to cede management of the property.

Becciu, the primary cardinal prosecuted by the Vatican felony tribunal, was convicted of embezzlement involving the unique London funding and two tangent instances. The dealer who acquired the 15 million euro payout to cede management of the constructing, Gianluigi Torzi, was convicted of extortion and different expenses.

The Vatican’s longtime cash supervisor, Enrico Crasso, was convicted of three expenses of the unique 21 he confronted. But he too plans to attraction, stated his lawyer Luigi Panella.

“Contrary to the propaganda spread, the prosecutor’s appellate motion reveals that the tribunal to a large extent didn’t uphold the accusatory formula,” Panella stated in an e-mail.

Yet even for the three expenses Crasso was convicted of, the tribunal sentenced him to greater than what Diddi had initially sought, “and this somewhat masked the numerous acquittals,” Panella stated.

The verdict additionally did some authorized gymnastics to make sense of the Vatican’s outdated felony code, primarily based on Italy’s 1889 code and the church’s canon regulation, requalifying or combining expenses to suit into different ones.

In his attraction, Diddi objected to the tribunal’s refusal to let him use a jailhouse interrogation of London dealer Torzi, as a result of Torzi by no means offered himself subsequently to be questioned throughout the trial. Torzi refused to return to the Vatican after he was jailed for 10 days with out cost on a decide’s arrest warrant in 2020 throughout the investigation and was solely launched after he wrote a memo to prosecutors.

Diddi was capable of detain him due to the sweeping powers granted to the prosecution within the Vatican’s authorized system, in addition to additional powers granted to him by 4 secret decrees Pope Francis signed throughout the investigation that allowed prosecutors to wiretap and detain suspects with out a decide’s warrant.

Defense attorneys have cited these decrees in addition to the prosecutors’ means to withhold proof from discovery as proof that their shoppers couldn’t obtain a good trial in Europe’s solely absolute monarchy the place Francis wields supreme legislative, government and judicial energy, and used them within the investigation.

In a post-verdict essay, protection legal professional Cataldo Intrieri denounced the “contradictions” of the Vatican authorized system and the powers given to prosecutors, which he stated resulted in an investigation and trial that had been “well distant from those adopted in a state of law.”

“The point is that a fair trial isn’t just the courtroom debate about evidence, which is certainly a fundamental element, but also an ‘equality of arms’ in the law to have access to evidence,” he wrote within the Linkiesta on-line every day. “The true problem, and we understood this immediately, is the anomalous concentration of power that the pope, the spiritual head of the Holy See and absolute sovereign of the Vatican state, gave to the office of the prosecutors.”

Intriere defended Fabrizio Tirabassi, a former official within the Vatican secretariat of state who acquired the stiffest verdict, 7 ½ years in jail for convictions of embezzlement, extortion and cash laundering. He denied wrongdoing; different protection attorneys as properly introduced they’d attraction.