By Vish Gain for AMLi
AN ENGLISH COURT, the latest battleground for a financial feud between the Vatican and an Italian businessman over a London property deal, has quashed the Vatican’s request to have his assets frozen after it found “appalling” misrepresentations in the Church’s case.
The Crown Court in Southwark revoked an order that had frozen the assets of Gianluigi Torzi on the Vatican’s request on charges of extortion, embezzlement, fraud and money laundering, all of which the businessman denied.
The 42-page ruling was released earlier this month and only made public last week. It is understood the Vatican had requested the ruling be kept private.
Torzi was hired by the Vatican in 2018 to negotiate and close the purchase of a luxury property in London’s Chelsea. The Vatican has since alleged that Torzi conspired with some Vatican officials to extort around €15m from the Secretariat through blackmail and exorbitant fees.
After a Vatican crackdown last year, Torzi was jailed for ten days. Five Vatican officials had also lost their jobs earlier as a fallout of the investigations, which are still ongoing. However, the charges against Torzi himself have since been dropped and it is unclear what the Vatican’s stance is at the moment.
Judge Tony Baumgartner said he revoked an earlier ruling to freeze some of Torzi’s funds in London partly because the Vatican’s “non-disclosures and misrepresentations are so appalling”, according to a report by Reuters. Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said there was no immediate comment on the ruling, adding that the Vatican’s investigation was continuing.
The case, which has now become a full-blown financial scandal, has reached the highest echelons of the Holy See’s hierarchy. Torzi’s lawyers said his dealings had been directly or indirectly approved by top Vatican officials — including Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and his deputy for general affairs, Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra, the two most powerful figures in the Church after the Pope.
Reuters reported that Vatican lawyers attempted to show “the astonishment of higher authorities” over some of the financial details of the deal negotiated by two lower-level officials in the Secretariat, including a member of the clergy. But the judge ruled that if that was the case, both Parolin and Pena Parra “must have had the wool pulled completely over their eyes.”
The decision noted that the Vatican had failed to provide any witness evidence from senior officials who were directly involved in the property transaction with Torzi, including Parolin and Peña Parra.
Torzi has always maintained his dealings with the Vatican were above board,” his lawyer, James Mullion, told Reuters on Friday. “The judge rightly found very troubling failures by the Vatican to disclose the full facts of the case,” Mullion said.
“The people who signed the contracts were signing them with the authority of the Vatican.”
An FT report even suggested that after Torzi had acquired the building on the Vatican’s behalf he claimed he was threatened by a junior Vatican official and an external adviser, who told him “you either give up the [London] property and go away, or your life and that of your children is at risk”.
The ruling also noted that Torzi claimed one of the Vatican employees who was suspended offered him the services of a sex worker as a “gift in recognition of his efforts” but that he refused.
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