CNA Staff, Jun 9, 2020 / 03:00 am (CNA).- Cardinal Angelo Becciu has said that the arrest of a businessman at the center of a Vatican property deal will have no wider repercussions and that business in the Vatican “will continue as before.”
Commenting on the June 5 arrest of Gianluigi Torzi, the former sostituto at the Secretariat of State said that he did not know the Italian businessman charged by Vatican prosecutors with fraud, extortion, money laundering and other crimes. Becciu also defended the investment of hundreds of millions of euros in the London property at 60 Sloane Avenue, and said it still represented good value for money.
“I don’t know Torzi, I was no longer sostituto when the facts that are attributed [Torzi] happened,” Becciu told Adnkronos after the announcement of Torzi’s arrest.
Before he was made a cardinal in June, 2018, Becciu was the second-ranking official at the Vatican Secretariat of State, which invested hundreds of millions of euros in the London property between 2014-2018. Torzi acted as a broker, a commission-earning middleman, for the Secretariat of State as it finalized the purchase in 2018 and 2019.
The Adnkronos report offers Becciu’s account of his role at the Vatican. Becciu insists that Torzi’s involvement in the project came after the cardinal had become head of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints in the summer of 2018, but that the original investment in the building was a sound decision.
“Are you sure that that building was a waste? But there has been no doubt that if sold now it would make double what it cost – 148 million euros when I was there, if there were other [additional expenses] then ask who made them, I was no longer there.”
On Saturday, the cardinal dismissed the idea that Torzi’s arrest would cause a broader “earthquake” in the curia, calling it “a journalistic fantasy.”
Becciu’s interview concluded with his declaration that “[Torzi] will have to answer for a specific crime for which he alone is responsible. And the Vatican will continue as before.”
CNA has reported that between 2014 and 2018, the Secretariat of State paid around $300 million for the building, bought from Italian businessman Raffaele Mincione. Mincione arranged the secretariat’s initial investment through an investment fund through which he managed hundreds of millions of euros for the Secretariat of State.
Completion of the sale was conducted through Gutt SA, a Luxembourg-registered holding company owned by Torzi.
According to a press statement from the Holy See, Torzi was arrested Friday in connection with “well-known events connected with the sale of the London property on Sloane Avenue, which involved a network of companies in which some officials of the Secretariat of State were present.”
In May, CNA reported that in November 2018, a lay official at the Secretariat of State was made a director of Gutt, for a period of one month. That official, Fabrizio Tirabassi, was suspended from his position in October, 2019, following a raid by Vatican investigators.
In his statements to Adnkronos over the weekend, Becciu repeated previous denials that the investment used funds from Peter’s Pence, a fund of donations sent to the Holy See by Catholics and dioceses around the world to support the ministry of the pope.
On Saturday, Vatican News reported that the investments made by the secretariat in Mincione’s Athena Global Opportunities Fund amounted to 200 million euros. It reports Mincione invested this money in the building, which he owned, and other ventures of Mincione’s, which it described to be a “conflict of interest.”
On Nov. 4, 2019, CNA reported that in 2015 Cardinal Becciu seems to have attempted to obscure on Vatican balance sheets nearly 200 million in loans connected to the transaction by cancelling them out against the value of the property in London, an accounting maneuver prohibited by financial policies approved by Pope Francis in 2014.
That apparent attempt to obscure the loans was detected by the Prefecture for the Economy, then led by Cardinal George Pell. Senior officials at the Prefecture for the Economy told CNA in 2019 that Becciu told Pell the cardinal was “interfering in sovereign business” by looking into the secretariat’s dealings with Swiss bank BSI.
BSI was closed by Swiss banking authorities in 2017, following an investigation which found systematic violations of anti-money laundering protections.
On Saturday, Becciu said that Torzi’s involvement in the London property deal came only after he had left the secretariat.
In May, CNA reported that Swiss authorities had frozen tens of millions of euros in several bank accounts as part of the Vatican’s investigation into the deal.
On June 6, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that among the funds frozen were several million under the control of Msgr. Alberto Perlasca.
Perlasca served under Becciu for nearly a decade as head of the administrative office of the secretariat’s First Section until July 2019, when he was transferred to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the Holy See’s supreme court. Perlasca worked as a prosecutor at the court, until his office and home were raided by investigators in February.
In an interview with the newspaper Il Giornale on Monday, Perlasca denied that he had any Swiss bank accounts and is “ready to sue anyone who claims otherwise.”
Perlasca said that “there was considerable confusion, I hope not knowingly, between personal accounts and accounts of the Secretariat of State, on which, however, I had no signature power since only the superiors had it. I only had the power to sign in conjunction with another superior. I don’t remember ever having to use it, because there never was a need. In other words: I couldn’t move a single cent.”
Perlasca said he personally lodged a complaint against Torzi in 2018, alleging fraud by the businessman.
Corriere also reported that accounts belonging to Mincione have been seized by Swiss authorities as part of the investigation, as well as those under the control of Enrico Crasso, who has also managed Holy See investments through the Centurion Global Fund.
Crasso told Corriere that the accounts relevant to him were only under his management and not personal accounts. Previously, CNA reported on Centurion’s connections to several institutions subject to allegations of money laundering.
On Saturday, Mincione denied any relationship to Torzi beyond working with him as the secretariat’s chosen intermediary for the completion of the property purchase.
In an interview with Adnkronos, Mincione said that apart from knowing Torzi slightly as a social acquaintance, his contact with him was limited to Torzi’s mandate to act on behalf of the secretariat, given by Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, who replaced Becciu as sostituto in 2018.
Mincione insisted in the interview that his dealings with the secretariat were all legitimate, and that the Holy See could still realize a profit on the London property.
Mincione also appeared to imply that responsibility for Torzi’s involvement could ultimately lay with Pope Francis, saying “there is a picture of Torzi with the pope, which I have. [Torzi] was given this job by Peña Parra, [who was himself] appointed by the pope.” It is unclear why or how Mincione would have a photo of Torzi with the pope, especially if the two businessmen were not close.
CNA has previously reported that Torzi, along with his family, were received in a private audience with Pope Francis on December 26, 2018. Repeated requests, over several months, to the Holy See asking how the meeting was arranged have gone unanswered.
On the same day as Mincione’s interview with Adnkronos, a picture apparently showing Torzi and his wife with Pope Francis began circulating online.
Perlasca told Il Giornale that “It seems very bad to call the Holy Father directly into this matter.”
“I know that, at the end of December 2018, there was a meeting with him, to which however no representative of the Administrative Office was invited,” Perlasca said.
[…]
A Pope, resistant to doctrine and the Ordinary Magisterium relative to centuries of Church Tradition, continues to turn the minor experience of a ‘synod’ into the universal importance of a Council under the guise of ‘listening to the people’ and continuing to be indifferent to Revelation and forgetting what it means to bring Souls back to Christ.
Two years instead of one, a great idea! As things now stand, synodality is all over the map in every sense of the word. Time now for a reality check by the one, hole, catholic and apostolic Church…
Yes, extended to two sessions there’s even the opportunity for Batzing to be replaced, and for a smooth replacement of the echo-chamber voices, Grech and Hollerich. And, even for a successor pope (?) to restore all of the Successors of the Apostles as something more than flip-chart “facilitators” for a congeries of interests of one color or another, or of all colors in the rainbow.
Butt, one problem is that the gangrenous German “synodal way” is also likely on a 2024 timeline. With its agenda to mainstream the homosexual lifestyle, masturbation (be inclusive!), bigamy, and priestesses. So, the fly in the ointment (double entendre intended) is the danger of some kind of plebiscite mega-surprise attached in the second year 2024—just as undefined “synodality” itself was annexed in 2018 to the very unrelated “Synod on Young People, Faith and Vocational Discernment.” Pin the tail on the donkey!
Still, 2024 is a good opportunity in the United States to leaven synodal listening with the 2024 National Eucharistic Conference in Indianapolis. And, of course the year 2023 must be avoided, since that will be the 30th Anniversary of Veritatis Splendor—a modernday “prisoner of the Vatican.”
Great. Another year of confusion, navel-gazing and catering to the zeitgeist.
Or maybe more time to expose the rot so we can excise it.
One can only hope. And pray.
First the synod general secretariat said that the whole-church Synod is the fruit of VATICAN II and now the Holy Father takes it further and says that it is “constitutive dimension of the Church” whereby it will help Christians “proclaim the joy of the Gospel”.
I suspect and I suggest that there is some other cause -misgiving- for the extension but a need to make it known in haste determined a badly crafted explanation.
The thing that constitutes the Church is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
“Synod” being “mentioned throughout the Council documents” refers to subsidiary activity in particular Churches.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/10/10/vaticans-synod-on-synodality-organizers-say-synod-is-fruit-of-second-vatican-council/
‘ “To know the reality of Asia, which is a vast continent starting from Kazakhstan in the far west end to Japan in the far east end, we have to immerse ourselves into the completely diverse stories of each of the 22 countries present,” Kikuchi said.
“We immediately realized that as Asia is a continent of complex realities with different cultures, it is not easy task to make one unified policy for pastoral response. Because of this realization, we understood the meaning of the last phrase of the Theme of the General Conference which is: And they went a different way,” the archbishop said. ‘
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-asia/2022/10/asian-bishops-considers-future-paths-for-church-on-continent-of-complex-realities
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-asia/2022/10/pope-urges-asian-bishops-to-count-on-laypeople-celebrate-diversity
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-oceania/2022/10/fiji-archbishop-warns-against-new-colonial-forces-in-pacific-nation
Many of the buffoons who write for that journal (which often appears as much of a journal of Catholic anti-Catholic bigotry as the bad NCR) never tire of contriving the immutable truth it is the Church’s mission to witness as an act of imperialism which requires heavy doses of moral relativism to counteract, oblivious to how this affects the destruction of life and souls. “Complex” has become the new bludgeon word for denying the reality of God’s gift of truth.
May the Father of Lights prolong and extend their discernment…indefinitely.
My sentiments exactly. Make the Synod a permanent fixture in the Church rather than torturing us with death by a thousand paper cuts.
“The Synod on Destroying Catholicism” is taking longer than originally thought.
If the China Provisional Agreement is renewed later this month on its “anniversary” October 22 and gets another 2-year period, it then coincides with the extended timeline of the “Synod”.
The FIDES article is worth reading in full I think.
‘ In the dominant representations of the relations between China and the Vatican, the factors that pushed the Holy See to follow the path it has taken, and the criteria that have guided it in its choices on questions so vital to the sensus Ecclesiae of Chinese Catholics, are generally suppressed and hidden. ‘
http://www.fides.org/en/news/72835-VATICAN_The_China_Holy_See_Agreement_and_the_treasure_of_faith
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2020/10/22/201022a.html
Yes, let’s twiddle our thumbs while Rome burns.
I am so done with this S on S.
I’m with Robert Royal, The Catholic Thing, “VIII by a thousand cuts” (words to that effect), Oct. 17.
In the photo are 6 people that I wouldn’t entrust to be alone talking to my children, or anyone I cared about.
They oppose the apostolic faith, for instance, they oppose the Church’s moral teaching against sodomy, as stated by Eminence Hollerich, SJ.
They should be shunned, as St. Paul says about disbelievers “inside the Church.”
It’s worth noting that a full half of the Synodality leadership as shown in the photo (3 out of 6) are Jesuits. They’re not doing a very good job of hiding their takeover of the Church, are they?
Wang Libin supplies good information and, I think, analysis, in his article here at THE DIPLOMAT May 7 2022, “China-Vatican Relations in the Xi Era”; however he hasn’t disentangled the problems:
‘ The practical need to gain control, if only nominally, of China’s 12 million Catholics has conflicted with the conscientious need to condemn the CCP, making Pope Francis ambivalent about whether the two sides should sign a formal agreement on the bishop arrangement this October, when the renewed deal will expire. ‘
The problem is serial, i.e., inter-connected with one consequent on the other, etc. The Holy Father identifies “formal” relations as inferior but the Provisional Agreement has fixed faithful Catholics under the legalistic handle of the CPC inside a confusion of ideas; and placed the Holy See in a conflict between not dividing the hierarchy but dividing it. It’s one thing to identify formalism as having a danger of being empty. But are you even able to handle substantial relationships that do not have formalist expression? Do you even care to do so? Mustn’t you at least try? And mustn’t you avoid over-laying your effort with other actions that tend to neutralize it or cancel it?
Why subjugate Chinese Catholics and all Chinese with them, to the ideas of the CPC? How can you do that and in the same moment proclaim that reality is greater than ideas? Which reality is being sustained?
Following Libin’s train of thought, 4 years have passed and nothing has changed.
Then can’t it also be seen that 4 years have passed and nothing has been learned?
https://thediplomat.com/2022/05/china-vatican-relations-in-the-xi-era/
Maybe enough discernment has occurred to discern that the Holy Spirit is busy discerning and is still very confused since Francis has discerned in his many discernments that God is a God in process, a God who discerns through history, uncertain from one age to another of what is really true or not, what is really real or not, what needs to be discerned about right and wrong. After all, the Holy Spirit should not be tempted to be involved in commiting the “sin of backwardness”. Francis must be discerning that discerning is difficult for all beings, greater and lesser.
A famous saying is “ if it ain’t broke, dont fix it”. An extra year of this confused synod is nothing more than an extended opportunity to misdirect and destroy the church. The church has been mostly skidding downhill since V2 wrought so much destruction on tradition, discipline and decimated vocations. This so-called synod is on target to make it worse. Disgusted by the vapidness of the German Bishops.
https://wherepeteris.com/the-synod-on-synodality-mission-accomplished/ – a difft take on the need for the process of listening , in the trusting hope in The Spirit that it would open hearts to hear Him , to bring needed repentance too in all areas where in the enemy voice reverberates .. the decision to extend the synod for another year – ? also as reparation for a Church that has closed its ears and heart , while giving lip service if at that to the role of the Holy Father and The Catholic Church,
? effects of same manifesting in own people as hatred for life and related addictions , lust for power and money among those in authority .. Same then spilling over as wars and vindictiveness, instead of the good will to listen to own people to hear of the help needed , in how to be ‘orthodox ‘in protecting the sacredness of life and marriage ..
Good to see EWTN doing the Rosary devotion for peace in Ukraine by participating in same from Lourdes …Immaculate Conception – a blessed truth given to The Church , to prepare the children for these times of carnal flood waters .. for a deeper awareness that each life has its origin in the Giver of Life , that the noncarnal purity of same is for us through The Mother … ? the fear of that truth as the tool used by the enemy to keep even Churches that claim oneness in Truth , yet reluctant to accept same whole heartedly ..and instead find reasons to magnify perceived errors in the patient , compassionate stand of the Holy Father in his difficult role to deal with the entrenched wounds and sensitivities …the joy and enthusiasm with which the synodal process is accepted in some places to be ? the antidote for the fears and the sclerotic stubborness in other places ..instead to be young at heart, through the young too , who ‘make a mess ‘ – such as the Bl.Carlo Acutis who loved St.Francis and The Eucharist ..The endearing dialogue that St.Luke would have had with The Mother – that they likley continue in heaven , rejoicing in already beholding in the Eternal Now in the Divine Will , how the mighty have been cast down – as given in a recent talking / teaching ‘doctoring ‘ moment by the Holy Father …may The Spirit drown out and remove all dragon flood waters to help us all to heed His whisper – as His Love for the littlest to the least ..
FIAT !
What exactly is “compassionate” from the actions of a “Holy Father” who seeks to trivialize the damage done to the victims of sin through institutionalizing the process of a permanent deconstruction of the objective moral order given to us by God to where it becomes meaningless?
Personally, I’d like to see synodality extended into 2025 as well. But why stop there? Since it’s such a brilliant, stupendous idea, let’s make it perpetual. It will, thus, renew the Church every year like clockwork, long after Pope F. has sailed off into the sunset. What a legacy it will be. Eternal sodality–at least until the Kingdom comes.
Synods will continue until consensus is reached!