The Vatican’s first auditor-general and his deputy, who were appointed in 2015 and fired two years later, are suing the Holy See for €9.3 million (R163 million) in damages, alleging they were sacked after discovering financial irregularities.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said on Thursday that he had no comment on the lawsuit, which was filed last week with the Vatican’s prosecutor's office by lawyers for Libero Milone and Ferruccio Panicco.
Milone, 74, a former chairman and CEO of Deloitte in Italy, was appointed by Pope Francis in 2015 as part of an effort to clean up Vatican finances and raise accounting procedures to international standards of accountability and transparency.
He was told to resign in 2017 by Cardinal Archbishop Angelo Becciu, who was then the number two in the Vatican's Secretariat of State, its most important department.
Becciu said in 2017 that Milone “went against all the rules and was spying on the private lives of his superiors and staff, including me”.
Milone denies this, saying he was just seeking information he had a right to see as the auditor-general.
"We did the right thing – we never spied, we have been honest, and we did what we had to do – but unfortunately what we had to do was very embarrassing," Milone said at a briefing at his lawyers’ offices in Rome.
Pope Francis fired Becciu in 2020. Becciu is currently one of 10 defendants on trial in the Vatican on charges including corruption and embezzlement related to the purchase of a building in London. All of the accused deny any wrongdoing.
The Vatican's prosecutor's office said it had recently reopened an investigation into events at the time of the sacking in 2017. Milone said he had been summoned to appear next week.
Becciu said he had nothing new to say about the Milone case, directing a reporter to his testimony in the court where he is now on trial, which says it was the pope who ordered Milone's ousting and that he merely carried it out.
Becciu's lawyers said Milone had given a “a completely unfounded reconstruction” of events in the legal filing.
Milone said that at the start of his mandate he had good relations with the pope, telling him “everything I found” and meeting him regularly.
But that changed in 2016 at about the same time he requested more information from Becciu on the London building, and he suspected that the pope did not receive his letters after that.
DISINFORMATION
The 53-page legal filing alleges that "a filter" was put up which made it difficult for Milone to reach Pope Francis, who was the target of a “disinformation operation” by some in the Vatican.
Milone said at the briefing that he had been looking into suspicious transfers between bank accounts of senior Vatican officials, others involving hospitals associated with the Vatican, and the discovery that an email account in the pope's private office may have been compromised by spyware.
In the filing, Milone's lawyers say that in 2016 Becciu and his assistants showed Milone a document about the Secretariat of State's real estate holdings, including the London building.
Milone then asked for full documentation about the real estate dealings "in order to carry out normal auditing activities", but he never received it, the filing says.
"And now I am being put on a cross because I did the right thing? Because I did what I should have done?" Milone asked, adding that his career and reputation had been destroyed.
REUTERS