Australian Police Investigate Vatican Transfers During Cardinal Pell Trial

The Vatican lives immersed in a long soap opera that explodes in chapters since Pope Francis decided to deprive Cardinal Angelo Becciu, one of the most powerful cardinals in the Holy See, of all his rights.

To the initial accusations of embezzlement, however, there has been a trickle of leaks that implicate him in all kinds of scandals.

The latest is the alleged purchase of the will of some key witnesses to the trial that took place in Australia against Cardinal George Pell, one of his greatest rivals in the Vatican, during which he was convicted and imprisoned for abuses (later he was acquitted for fault testing).

Now, Australian police confirm that they have received information released by the financial crime watchdog about alleged transfers of funds from the Vatican during the trial.

The department in charge of investigating this flow of capital told EFE that "it is a routine matter of financial intelligence exchange between AUSTRAC (the Australian Transaction Analysis and Reporting Center) and AFP (the Australian Federal Police)."

Furthermore, they acknowledge that they are "reviewing the relevant information."

The Australian police further note that they are working on this matter with the Independent Anti-Corruption Commission of the State of Victoria, where Pell was tried.

After his conviction and spending 13 months in jail, Pell was acquitted in April of the indictment of various crimes of child abuse by the Supreme Court, Australia's highest court.

The Pope, in fact, received him last week and the Holy See recorded and broadcast the meeting: a way to publicly rehabilitate the cardinal, in whom the Pope never lost confidence and kept in office until his mandate officially expired.

Becciu's lawyers and the cardinal himself already denied last week that the cardinal could have transferred funds, private or from the Vatican, for that purpose.

But the media campaign and the permanent leaks point in the opposite direction.

Becciu is accused through the leaks that emerge from the Vatican courts - he is not yet called to sit on the bench formally - of creating a kind of parallel Vatican with the funds reserved from the Secretary of State in whose engine room he was for a decade.

A structure that theoretically began to uncover after a bad real estate operation in London that forced the Holy See to pay up to 300 million for the sale of a building that had been the headquarters of the Harrod's department store.

The latest scandal came when a week ago, under an international arrest warrant coordinated by Interpol, the already known in the Italian media as “lady of the cardinal” was arrested.

This is Cecilia Marogna, 39 years old and head of an intelligence agency based in Slovenia whom Becciu had hired and transferred up to 500,000 euros for alleged diplomatic and intelligence missions.

Part of that money, she has recognized herself, was used to buy luxury items: 12,000 euros for a Frau armchair;

2,200 euros in Prada products, and 1,400 in Tod's or 8,000 in Chanel.

"Perhaps the bag was for the wife of a Nigerian friend who could speak to the president of Burkina Faso," she defended.

In the

newspaper

, Marogna also assured that part of that money was her fees and that she spent them as she wanted: "I am not a missionary, I do not work for free."

The Becciu case now threatens to drag down other major players from the Vatican in recent years.

In fact, the newspaper

reported this weekend that payments to Marogna began under the mandate of Becciu's replacement in the Secretary of State, the Venezuelan Edgar Peña-Parra.

Becciu's environment insists that he always acted within the law and, especially, with the knowledge of his superiors.

Something that given the high rank in the chain of command that he had, would leave room for few people.