Vatican Indicts Cardinal, Nine Other People Over London Real-Estate Deal

ROME—The Vatican said it indicted Cardinal Giovanni Becciu and nine other people today in relationship with a highly-priced investment decision in London real estate, the source of one particular the most important scandals of Pope Francis’s reign.

Cardinal Becciu, who was the next optimum formal at the Vatican’s Secretariat of Condition when it acquired the residence, was indicted on costs of embezzlement, abuse of workplace and subornation. His trial will be the very first of a churchman with his rank in Vatican City’s prison court.

Pope Francis purchased an investigation in 2019 after the Vatican bank flagged as suspicious a ask for by the Secretariat of Condition for a €150-million loan to refinance the acquisition expenditures of a creating in London’s upscale Chelsea district.

By a sequence of complicated transactions, the secretariat had paid out the equal of much more than $four hundred million by 2018 for the residence, which had offered for 50 % that quantity 6 years before, Vatican prosecutors told a London court final year. The Vatican was trying to get the extradition of a middleman, Gianluigi Torzi, accused of extortion, embezzlement, fraud and money laundering.

In September of final year, Cardinal Becciu renounced his Vatican put up and the rights of a cardinal, though not his title, at the ask for of Pope Francis. The Vatican didn’t give a explanation for the transfer at that time.