Vatican Financial Trial: Former Official Describes Frenzy to Salvage London Deal

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A former Vatican official testified Tuesday 31 May 2022 that he was under intense “psychological pressure” to finalize a deal over the Holy See’s troubled investment in a London property, but entered into the negotiations without a lawyer and didn’t realize the deal got the Vatican nothing in return.

Newsroom (03/06/2022 1:30 PM Gaudium Press) Fabrizio Tirabassi testified for some seven hours about the frenzied meetings he attended in London Nov. 20-22, 2018, that the Holy See had thought would salvage its 350-million-euro investment in the former Harrod’s warehouse and stem its losses.

Instead, the contracts negotiated in those days turned control of the London property over to an Italian broker, Gianluigi Torzi, who was unknown to the Vatican only a month prior. Allegedly, Torzi got in the door because acquaintances of Pope Francis recommended him.

According to observers, a perfect storm of incompetence, apparent criminality, and blind trust in people presented as friends of Pope Francis are at the heart of the Vatican’s big fraud and embezzlement trial. Vatican prosecutors have accused ten people, including Tirabassi, of fleecing the Holy See of tens of millions of euros. They also accuse Torzi of extorting the Vatican for 15 million euros to get full ownership of the property. They all deny wrongdoing.

Tirabassi was the No. 2 in the secretariat of State administrative office, managing some 600 million euros in assets, including donations from the faithful to the pope for charity. Starting around 2012, the office decided to diversify its portfolio and put some 200 million euros in a fund that, among other things, was investing in the London warehouse and developing it into a luxury residential property.

By late 2018 the fund had lost 18 million euros of the Holy See’s money and the Vatican’s auditor general was asking questions: The auditor had put an end-of-the-year deadline for the secretariat of state to explain the deal and turn it around. Tirabassi said he felt “psychologically pressured” to find a way out.

Tirabassi and his boss, Archbishop Alberto Perlasca, worked with a handful of Italian businessmen who were presented as having a “privileged rapport with the Holy Father,” Tirabassi said, to figure out a way to buy out the fund manager, Raffaele Mincione, and obtain the shares of the building the Vatican owned.

One of those Francis friends introduced Tirabassi to Torzi. According to Tirabassi, between mid-October and mid-November, Torzi stepped up with a solution that was hammered out in his London offices on Nov. 20-22.

Perlasca sent Tirabassi and the Vatican’s longtime external financial adviser to London to work out the details, but they realized once they got there, that they needed a lawyer. A text message read out in court from Perlasca said that “we’d be in big trouble” if the auditor-general discovered that they had entered into a new set of contracts over the London property without a lawyer present.

Perlasca balked at spending 160,000 pounds on one lawyer familiar with the deal, Tirabassi said. And so they decided to entrust their interests to Torzi’s lawyer, thinking they were on the same side.

The deal called for the Holy See to have 30,000 shares of the building in one of Torzi’s holding companies, Gutt, with Torzi keeping 1,000 shares. However, in the signed contract, Torzi stipulated that his shares had all the voting rights, meaning he effectively owned and controlled the building.

Tirabassi testified that he didn’t realize the “diversity of the shares” and said he thought Torzi’s 1,000 shares were necessary for him to manage the property and would serve as compensation if the Vatican ever sold the property.

In the end, the Vatican bought out Torzi’s 1,000 voting shares for 15 million euros, the basis for the charge of extortion against Torzi, which he denies. The trial continues. 

(Via Crux Now)

Compiled by Raju Hasmukh

 

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