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Pope Francis met on Monday with the staff of the Office of the Auditor General, the Vatican department charged with ensuring financial compliance across the Roman curia.
The pope praised the dedication of the department\u2019s staff, but \u2014 amid several financial scandals unfolding in the Vatican \u2014 urged officials to balance the need for \u201Cabsolute transparency in every action\u201D with \u201Cmerciful discretion\u201D when dealing with cases of corruption.
The pope granted the audience just days before a Vatican City court is due to return a verdict in the landmark financial corruption case in which ten defendants, including Cardinal Angelo Becciu, are charged with a range of crimes, including embezzlement, fraud, and abuse of office.
Separately, in the coming weeks the Vatican City\u2019s judiciary is also expected to return a decision in a lawsuit brought by the former head of the auditor\u2019s office, who has alleged wrongful dismissal by Cardinal Becciu for uncovering widespread corruption in the Roman curia.
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In his address on Monday, Francis said that \u201Cthose who work at the Holy See and the Vatican City State certainly do so faithfully and honestly.\u201D
The pope did not read out his speech because, the Vatican press office said, he is \u201Crecovering from bronchitis,\u201D and instead had the text distributed.
\u201CBut,\u201D Francis conceded, \u201Cthe lure of corruption is so dangerous that we must be extremely vigilant.\u201D
\u201CI invite you to help those responsible for the administration of the Holy See's assets to create safeguards that can prevent, \u2018upstream\u2019, the insidiousness of corruption from materializing,\u201D Francis wrote.
But the pope also instructed the auditors to exercise \u201Cmerciful discretion\u201D when dealing with instances of corruption, saying that financial scandals \u201Cserve more to fill the pages of the newspapers than to correct behavior in depth.\u201D
That observation comes as a surprise, as the pope\u2019s Dec. 11 audience came just days before judges have said they expect to reach their verdict in the financial scandal trial.
Prosecutors have asked for prison sentences ranging from three to thirteen years for the various defendants, and are seeking close to half a billion euros in damages.
During its last inspection of Vatican City financial institutions, Moneyval, the Council of Europe\u2019s anti-money laundering watchdog, warned that internal corruption by Vatican officials, rather than use of Vatican banks by external actors, posed the primary risk of financial crime in the Vatican.
In 2021, Moneyval concluded that the general culture among curial officials carried a real risk of \u201Cfraud, misappropriation, giving and receiving bribes, and abuse of office,\u201D but that the threat was not taken seriously enough in the Vatican.
In May of this year, ASIF, the Vatican\u2019s financial watchdog, which monitors transactions through Vatican banks and financial institutions, said it had identified suspicious financial activities originating in two \u201CVatican authorities\u201D and another instance from a \u201Cnon-profit organization\u201D linked to the Holy See.
Francis\u2019 call for Vatican auditors to handle instances of curial corruption privately, and presumably outside the Vatican\u2019s legal system, to avoid scandal also comes amid a public dispute between the Holy See and the first person to hold the office of auditor general, Libero Milone.
Milone, a career auditor and accountant with a successful track record working across Europe and in the United States, was appointed to the newly created role in the early years of Pope Francis\u2019 pontificate before he was forced from office in 2017.
Pope Francis appointed him in 2015 and he worked closely with Cardinal George Pell, who was named the first prefect for the Secretariat for the Economy by the pope, until 2017.
In that year, Pell was forced to take a leave of absence from his role to successfully defend himself against abuse accusations in his native Australia, while Milone was forced from his position that same year, along with his deputy, Ferruccio Panicco.
Both auditors claim they were ousted because they had been too successful in uncovering financial corruption at the highest levels of the Vatican.
They filed a claim for wrongful dismissal in November this year, seeking more than 9 million euros in damages and lost income.
As part of the pre-trial process in the lawsuit, Panicco and Milone filed several hundred pages of documents, which they said proved they discovered widespread corruption among senior curial officials at the Vatican, and supported their contention that they were forced from office.
Pannico died earlier this year after a long battle with cancer, a condition he argued in his lawsuit was exacerbated and made fatal by the seizure of his private medical records by Vatican gendarmes.
At the time of their ouster, then-sostituto Cardinal Angelo Becciu said Milone had been made to resign under threat of criminal prosecution because he was \u201Cspying\u201D on the private financial affairs of senior officials, including Becciu himself.
In a public statement at the time of Milone\u2019s resignation, Becciu confirmed that Milone had been threatened with prosecution and said that Milone \u201Cwent against all the rules and was spying on the private lives of his superiors and staff, including me.\u201D \u201CIf he had not agreed to resign, we would have prosecuted him,\u201D Becciu said.
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During his audience with Milone\u2019s successors on Monday, Francis stated that the Office of the Auditor General \u201Cdoes not depend hierarchically on other entities,\u201D but is truly independent within the Roman curia.
That statement comes as Vatican judges have been considering what, if any, oversight the Secretariat of State has or previously had over the auditor\u2019s office.
Under Cardinal Becciu\u2019s tenure as sostituto, the Secretariat of State became the locus of resistance to attempts by Milone and Pell to audit curial finances, with the cardinal issuing an order canceling a planned external audit of all Vatican departments and moving to block oversight of his own department\u2019s financial affairs.
Both Pell and Milone have said Becciu initially cooperated with their efforts to audit the Secretariat of State, but became confrontational after they discovered a series of loans and investments obscured from departmental ledgers using accounting practices prohibited under Vatican financial law.
Among those investments was the London property deal, the exposure of which led to a sprawling investigation and criminal trial in which Becciu is accused of embezzlement and abuse of office.
Becciu has routinely stated in court that the Secretariat of State was outside the oversight of both the Secretariat for the Economy and the Office of the Auditor General, despite no such exemption being present in either department\u2019s remit.
In October, lawyers for the Secretariat of State conceded Milone\u2019s assertion that he was acting within his mandate in trying to investigate Becciu\u2019s former department.
In legal submissions obtained by The Pillar, lawyers for the Secretariat of State defined the relationship between Milone\u2019s former department and the secretariat as \u201Cthe relationship between the \u2018entity that provides to the audit of the financial statements\u2019 (the Auditor) and the \u2018entity subject to audit\u2019 (the Secretariat of State).\u201D
Becciu has also stated that he arranged for Milone\u2019s ousting from office on Pope Francis\u2019 instructions.
Prior to his comments Monday about scandals \u201Cfilling the pages of newspapers\u201D Pope Francis has previously made clear his distaste for financial scandals becoming public.
In his 2017 Christmas address to the curia, Francis made a thinly-veiled reference to Milone\u2019s sacking when he spoke about \u201Cpersons carefully selected to give a greater vigour to the [curial] body and to the reform, but \u2013 failing to understand the lofty nature of their responsibility \u2013 let themselves be corrupted by ambition or vainglory.\u201D
\u201CWhen they are quietly sidelined, they wrongly declare themselves martyrs of the system, of a \u2018pope kept in the dark,\u2019 of the \u2018old guard\u2019\u2026, rather than reciting a mea culpa,\u201D said Francis.
In the ongoing lawsuit, Milone\u2019s legal team deposited more than 500 pages of evidence with the court which he says prove he uncovered high level corruption during his work and that he was forced from office under threat of criminal prosecution to shut his efforts down.
\u201CWhat it was,\u201D Milone told The Pillar last year, \u201Cis that I discovered that there were cardinals putting money in their pockets, they were doing strange things.\u201D
\u201CEvidently, [Cardinal] Becciu and his friends must have come across these reports because he was the pope\u2019s chief of staff at the time, and got worried because \u2018this guy\u2019 was putting these cardinals in difficulty.\u201D
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