“Now you have to confess,” they demanded, according to
the auditor, Libero Milone. Faced, he said, with being thrown in a
Vatican jail, Mr. Milone signed resignation papers.
In the ensuing
five years, the Vatican has done much to clean up its financial act.
Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, one of the prelates whom Mr. Milone was
accused of spying on, and who Mr. Milone believes masterminded his
ouster, has himself been removed from his powerful position by Pope
Francis and is on trial in the Vatican for embezzlement and abuse of office and defrauding the church in connection with a disastrous London real estate deal.
But
Mr. Milone argues that the Vatican, which in 2018 formally stated that
there was no criminal investigation or judgment against him, has refused
to clear his name. Instead, the Vatican has reopened a criminal
investigation against him, in what he sees as a strong-arm tactic to
make him go away and protect its secrets.
“I was
discovering things that somebody wanted to keep undercover,” Mr. Milone
told a handful of journalists as he filed a lawsuit last week in the
Vatican court against the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, its most
powerful department, and the current auditor general. “All these matters
were reported to the pope. I wasn’t spying. I was doing my job.”
“I
didn’t know that I would find cardinals putting money in their pocket,
but I found it. And I told him,” he said of Pope Francis.
Matteo
Bruni, the Vatican spokesman, declined to comment on the case or on any
of Mr. Milone’s accusations, though he confirmed that the Vatican’s
prosecutor had an open file on Mr. Milone for embezzlement since this
spring, “after a confidentiality seal was removed from the case.”
In
their suit, Mr. Milone, the former chief executive of Deloitte &
Touche Italy, and a fellow auditor, Ferruccio Panicco, who blames the
Vatican for having contributed to the advancement of his prostate cancer
and cut short his life span by confiscating and withholding his medical
records, are seeking about nine million euros in damages. They say the
Vatican unjustly terminated their contracts, sullied their professional
reputations and essentially blacklisted them in Italy, where, Mr. Milone
said, “You can’t cross the Vatican.”
Mr. Milone’s
complaint depicts what it calls a dysfunctional “vipers’ nest” of
Vatican intrigue, financial malfeasance, papal hypocrisy about
transparency and a reign of terror by bug- and-blackmail-prone
gendarmes.
Above all, the complaint outlines the misuse of funds
by Vatican officials to enrich themselves and in some cases upgrade
their apartments. Mr. Milone argued that for all of the reports he filed
about financial impropriety, the secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro
Parolin, and the Vatican prosecutors “never, ever acted.”
Francis,
in Mr. Milone’s account, went from demanding personal PowerPoint
presentations about his findings (“My God, this is terrible,” Francis
said, according to Mr. Milone), to turning a cold shoulder to Mr. Milone
when the Vatican bureaucracy poisoned his ear, and finally to attacking
Mr. Milone after he publicly complained about his firing.
In a 2017 Christmas address, Francis excoriated corrupted reformers who, “when they are quietly sidelined,” he said, “wrongly declare themselves martyrs.”
Earlier
this year, during testimony in his own trial, Cardinal Becciu
emphasized that Francis had personally demanded that Mr. Milone be
fired.
As Mr. Milone sees it, he was simply doing the job the pope
hired him to do and it was not his fault if he easily discovered a raft
of embarrassing material.
The auditors discovered that
some of the Vatican departments keptgold bricks and coins, but when
they asked to inventory them, said the keys could not be found, he said.
The Vatican department overseeing church real estate investments
repeatedly sought to obstruct him and hid its financial records, he
said.
He
also accused cardinals, whom he declined to name now but said he would
if his case went to trial, of pocketing tens of thousands and sometimes
hundreds of thousands of the church’s dollars. He said he found that one
cardinal received 250,000 euros in donations that he kept in a plastic
shopping bag in his office. The prelate deposited an additional 250,000
euros, he claimed by accident, into his own personal account rather than
into the account of the Vatican department that he ran. Mr. Milone
informed Francis, who was furious, and instructed him to tell the
cardinal that he had been caught, he said.
“This person became
red. ‘But in my country I can do what I like,’” Mr. Milone recounted him
saying. Mr. Milone said the cardinal returned the money.
In Mr.
Milone’s telling, the main villain of the Vatican was Cardinal Becciu,
who acted as the pope’s chief of staff and who fought a war over
transparency in the Vatican with the Vatican’s former financial czar,
Cardinal George Pell of Australia, an ally of Mr. Milone. Cardinal Pell,
whose supporters say he was tarred with a sex abuse accusation as part
of the internal political war, pushed for the hiring of
PricewaterhouseCoopers as Vatican auditors.
“They are asking lots
of questions and asking information,” Mr. Milone said Cardinal Becciu
complained to him in one meeting. “You know, there should be a state
secret on the things we do.”
Fabio Viglione, Cardinal Becciu’s
lawyer, categorically denied Mr. Milone’s accusations, saying the
auditor’s reconstruction of events was “completely unfounded” and likely
to prompt a suit by the cardinal. Mr. Viglione pointed out that
Cardinal Becciu had already testified in court that he was simply
following the pope’s orders.
Another antagonist for Mr. Milone was
the commander of the Gendarmerie, Domenico Giani, who also was the
pope’s bodyguard and subsequently resigned over leaks related to an
investigation into apparent financial wrongdoing in the Vatican. Mr.
Milone said his office discovered that a refurbishing of Mr. Giani’s
apartment ran to about 400,000 euros. The complaint claims that Mr.
Giani’s portion of the expenses, about 170,000 euros, was provided by a
money transfer from the Gendarmerie, not by him.
“Internal funds to pay personal expenses,” Mr. Milone said.
Mr. Giani did not return a request for comment.
Mr.
Milone suspects Cardinal Becciu of planting the evidence that was
discovered in the 2017 raid by the current head of the gendarme, who
knew precisely where to look, he said, going to the locked cabinet “like
a bloodhound.”
“It
is all done deliberately to get me out when they decided in March 2016
that I was a danger because I was asking too many questions,” Mr. Milone
said.
In 2017, the Vatican claimed that it had conducted a more
than seven-month investigation into Mr. Milone for spying and improperly
using its money for his own interests.
But in May 2018, the
Vatican’s chief prosecutor issued a contrary statement, saying that
there were no investigations or sentences against Mr. Milone in their
records.
Mr. Milone said that in 2019, Cardinal Parolin informed him that Francis had sealed his case.
“It’s a brilliant idea to put a pontifical secret on a resignation,” Mr. Milone said bitterly.
On
Nov. 26, 2019, Mr. Milone officially requested to see the evidence
compiled against him in the previous investigation into his apparent
spying. The Vatican’s chief prosecutor responded in a letter in January
2020 that Mr. Milone had no right to the information, and declined his
request.
Early this year, the Vatican lifted the seal, but instead
of sharing the information with Mr. Milone, he said, they have reopened
the criminal investigation against him.
“They want to threaten
me,” he said, arguing the Vatican had presented him with new evidence
that was “clearly fake,” including what he called a forged document that
was dated months before he even got the Vatican job.
Mr. Milone
and his lawyers, who have been summoned to meet with the Vatican
prosecutor on Monday, insist they are willing to go to court, even if,
they acknowledge, the odds are stacked against them, especially in a
monarchy ruled by the pope.
“Who is he to block me from working?” Mr. Milone said angrily.
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting.
