“Non-liquid investment tools, unlisted, difficult to view and evaluate from the outside, closed funds, a sort of ‘hedge fund’, moreover with people in conflict of interest, were used. That was not the way to use the money of the Peter’s Pence!”. This is how the general auditor of the Holy See, Alessandro Cassinis Righini, defined the investment of the Secretariat of State in the Sloane Avenue building in London, at the center of the ongoing trial in the Vatican.
Cassinis Righini, in the 27th hearing of the trial on the management of the Secretariat of State’s funds, was the second witness summoned by the prosecution, and on August 8, 2019, he was the signatory of one of the two complaints – the other was from the IOR – that initiated the investigation into the purchase of the London building and thus the current trial. For exactly two hours, he answered questions first from the deputy promoter of justice Roberto Zannotti and then from the civil parties and defenses.
Cassinis also recalled the not so favorable climate encountered in the Secretariat of State from the summer of 2018, when Pope Francis had tasked him with a “specific review” in that Dicastery to deliver a “snapshot of the existing situation” to the new substitute who was to take office on October 15, Monsignor Edgar Pena Parra, successor to Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who in the meantime had left office.
Cassinis recalled that this episode was preceded, moreover, by the opposition directed between 2015 and 2016 to a review in the Secretariat of State entrusted to the international company Pricewaterhouse Cooper. “We are used to controlling, not being controlled,” Becciu said at the time, while for the head of the Administrative Office, Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, “the less you write in the budgets, the better”.
“When we started our activity,” reported Cassinis Righini, “some very strange things immediately appeared, which then also became the subject of our report. There were no independent appraisals on the value of the properties, reports on relationships with banks, budgets: we repeatedly requested them and they were never provided to us”. For example, the “pledge contract” for the loan of 250 million euros from Credit Suisse pledging 516 million euros from the Secretariat of State never arrived from the Administrative Office (the lawyers during the hearing, however, spoke of 564 million).
Cassinis was also “very surprised” when the Office considered an oil investment in Angola “in total contrast with the environmental criteria of Laudato si'” and certainly not “in a transparent democracy, as everyone knows”. The money not used for that project then ended up in the investment in the Athena Fund of R.M. for the Sloane Avenue building.
“Are you sure that the Peter’s Pence was used?” Zannotti explicitly asked. “Yes,” Cassinis exclaimed without hesitation, confirming the content of his complaint in court. He also reiterated the “passive attitude,” of blatant resistance opposed by the Administrative Office to all requests for documents, acts, budgets. “There were complaints, perhaps even rightly, of not having enough staff,” he recalled.
“But there it was mainly a matter of competence. The accounting was a disaster. It was absolutely incomprehensible”. The “specific review” also revealed that the Secretariat of State’s availability at the time was 928 million euros (“the superiors were aware of it, but the Pope certainly was not”) and, of these, “750 million were deposited in banks outside the Vatican, particularly Credit Suisse.
The answers we were given were that historically, since the ’90s, there were relationships with the representative in Italy”. And on the fact that the investment tools “concentrated risk and duplicated costs – with the double commissions of closed funds – evasive answers were given”. “They were speculative products, without a transparent market quotation, products not easily negotiable or sellable, not ‘liquid’ but of particular ‘viscosity'”. And on the fact that particular ethical criteria were not followed in investments at the time – made mandatory only last June – Cassinis recalled that “even APSA had investments contrary to the Social Doctrine of the Church, particularly in manufacturers of contraceptives and the morning-after pill. We then made it known and they immediately proceeded to sell”.
The last aspect, the fact that since November 26, 2018, the auditor had reported that in the contract to move from M.’s fund to Gianluigi Torzi’s, the latter retained a thousand shares with voting rights, to the detriment of the Secretariat of State, with all the consequences, even adventurous, that resulted. “We then suggested not to execute the agreement, which instead was closed on December 3,” concluded Cassinis Righini. “But why all that haste?”.
The lawyers of Cardinal Becciu, Fabio Viglione and Maria Concetta Marzo explained that the suspension of the PwC auditing consultancy in April 2016 was not an autonomous choice of the then Substitute Monsignor Becciu but a position taken by the Secretariat of State, reiterated moreover with a letter signed by the Cardinal Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin. “As for the centuries-old autonomy of the Secretariat, even from a financial point of view, it was reiterated with a pontifical rescript of December 5, 2016, issued in the hands of the same Cardinal Parolin. So much, to demonstrate the full legitimacy of Cardinal Becciu’s behavior, always based on the utmost institutional correctness”.
