A former adviser to the Pope, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, has been convicted of financial crimes and sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
Becciu, 75, is the most senior Catholic Church official ever to stand trial before a Vatican criminal court.
The Gateway Pundit reported on the trial of ten defendants accused of embezzlement involving participation in an investment fund and the purchase of a building in London, which resulted in huge losses for the Catholic Church.
According to Vatican News, the charges included money laundering, fraud, extortion, and abuse of office, extracting millions of dollars from the Vatican.
The nearly 500-page indictment was issued in July 2021 with 30,000 pages of supplemental documentation supplied by prosecutors.
During the trial, a secretly recorded phone call between Pope Francis and Cardinal Becciu was played to the Vatican Court.
The court said Becciu had been irresponsible and “highly speculative” to invest more than $200 million with Mincione’s fund between 2013-2014, noting this was about a third of the holdings of the Secretariat of State at the time.
In 2018, with Becciu in another Vatican job, the secretariat of state felt it was being deceived by Mincione and turned to another financier, Gianluigi Torzi, for help in squeezing Mincione out and buying the rest of the building.
In 2020, before Becciu’s fall from grace, he was removed from his job as head of the Vatican office overseeing the canonization of saints by Pope Francis with no public explanation.
Although he retained his title, he lost his most important right as a cardinal to participate in a conclave to elect a future pope.
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