Cardinal Becciu, five others sentenced to prison at Vatican trial

The Vatican City State criminal court sentenced Cardinal Angelo Becciu to five years and six months in prison on two counts of embezzlement and one of aggravated fraud but found him not guilty of abuse of office or witness tampering.

The 75-year-old cardinal’s attorney, Fabio Veglione, told reporters his client would appeal.

The three-judge panel of the Vatican court handed down the verdicts late on December 16. In addition to Cardinal Becciu, five other people were sentenced to jail time ranging from three years to seven years and were ordered to pay the Vatican millions of euros in damages.

Pending appeal, none of the six people given jail terms were taken into custody.

Only one of the 10 defendants, Msgr Mauro Carlino, the former secretary of then-Archbishop Becciu when he served as sostituto, the No. 3 position in the Vatican Secretariat of State, was found not guilty of all charges.

Enrico Crasso, a long-time investment manager who often worked with the Vatican, received the stiffest sentence: seven years in jail.

René Brülhart and Tommaso di Ruzza, respectively former president and former director of the Vatican’s financial watchdog agency, now known as the Supervisory and Financial Information Authority, were “absolved” of the charge of abuse of office but were found guilty of negligence for not reporting a suspect financial operation. They each were fined €1,750.

The trial revolved around the Vatican’s investment in a property in London’s chic Chelsea district. But the way the deal was structured and restructured ended up costing the Vatican as much as $200 million. Cardinal Becciu was the No. 3 official at the Vatican Secretariat of State when the property deal, using money invested by the secretariat, was first made in 2014.

The cardinal and three others – Raffaele Mincione, Fabrizio Tirabassi and Enrico Crasso – were found guilty of embezzlement for taking $200.5 million from the Secretariat of State’s investment fund – a third of the entire fund – and investing it with Athena Capital Commodities.

The court described the fund as being “highly speculative” and risky, which violated Vatican guidelines and canon law on the use of Church funds.

Mr Mincione, who ran Athena Capital, was found guilty of money laundering for using the Vatican funds to buy the London property, but the court said Cardinal Becciu, Mr Tirabassi and Mr Crasso were not responsible for the London property disaster because they had no control over the money once it was invested with Athena.

The cardinal also was accused of embezzling money that he gave to a Caritas project run by his brother in Sardinia and for aggravated fraud for giving more than €570,000 of Vatican money to a woman named Cecilia Marogna, who claimed she could help win the release of a nun kidnapped in Mali.