A corrupt thing "is a dirty thing and a Christian who lets corruption grab him is not a Christian, he stinks," Pope Francis said in 2015. If one keeps track of what the investigation triggered by an acquisition by the Vatican City State Secretariat of a building in London is revealing, the stench of corruption must be being felt strongly in the Vatican corridors these days. The purchase of a Sloane Avenue building in London in 2014 has been gradually blowing a “huge hole” in Holy See’s balance sheet.

The most apparent symbol of the degree to which the apostolic mandate was betrayed pursuing greedy real estate and financial speculation is perhaps how the Peter’s Pence, the donations the Church collects for social deeds for the poor, were used. Such a speculation is not exceptional but rather a very material method distinctive of Cardinal Angelo Becciu’s direction of the Secretariat of State, as L'Espresso tracked back in this report. Pope Francis never liked his modus operandi, and while speculators, brokers and financial promoters were misusing Peter's Pence and the Secretariat of State’s cash, he weaved a network of new rules and regulations for Vatican assets.

Born in Pattada, Sardinia, 72-years-old Cardinal Becciu was deputy for General Affairs from 2011 through to 2018. Pope Francis removed him from that role on 29 June 2018 "promoting" him with the purple of Prefect for the Congregation of the Cause of Saints. During his mandate Becciu entrusted—odd but lawful—the Vatican’s entire treasury to financier Enrico Crasso, a former Credit Suisse manager he had met a few years earlier in the context of an unsuccessful deal involving Angolan oil.

By means of his corporate affiliation, Sogenel Holding in Lugano first and Azimut later, Crasso channeled Vatican investment resources towards tax-haven-based speculative funds. The money took long detours before resurfacing back yielding very low returns against speculative gains in general, as the records of the stock portfolio of the Secretariat of State that we obtained show. Besides leveraging on the abilities of handlers like Enrico Crasso, the "Becciu method" had also a family side. According to the documents we gained access to, the deputy of the Secretariat of State asked for and was granted two non-repayable loans by the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) and one by the Peter's Pence. The funds went to SPES, a business incorporated as a co-operative, and the operational branch of Caritas in Ozieri, in Sassari province in Sardinia, whose owner and legal representative is his brother Tonino.

Cardinal Becciu’s unusual, albeit non-criminal, way of managing money speaks volumes about his long-practiced handling of financial affairs, as we describe below. Following a first request on September 2013, SPES, the co-operative, received grants for an amount of 300,000 euros to expand its activities and to modernize its oven. That is not the only support it got. Due to a fire in one of the outbuildings, in January 2015 the Cardinal requested that further 300,000 euros be allocated to the co-operative. He did so despite a large insurance premium for fire damage the organization headed by his brother was about to pocket. The funds that Cardinal Becciu requested and obtained proceeded from the “otto per mille” (eight per thousand, 0.8%, a compulsory tax Italian taxpayers devolve to organized churches for humanitarian and social purposes) that CEI collects.

The third and final request for a non-refundable grant of 100,000 is dated April 2018. This time the grant was to be used, so the Cardinal stated, to refurbish first-line facilities for arriving migrants. Rather than from CEI, this grant came from Peter’s Pence, which, again, falls under the control of Cardinal Becciu.
The significant amount of money deputy Becciu requested and obtained entered a family loop that is difficult to trace, further exposing the Holy See to a relevant conflict of interest. So much so that several "white" (catholic) co-operation organizations began voicing internal complaints about the inappropriateness of the ties between their giver and their receiver.

Time going by and nobody expressing doubts allowed the operations to sink into silence. The Becciu method, nonetheless, is not recent, our sources within the Holy See tell us. It dates to around two decades ago, when the Cardinal was Apostolic Nuncio. Another sibling of him, Francesco, who owned a carpentry company, obtained with the same procedure funds to refurbish and furnish a number of churches in Angola and Cuba, where the to-be Cardinal had been Nuncio. That was happening many years ago when there was no control over how contracts were granted to third parties—and using family ties was a common practice.

Back to our days, another revealing case is that of Angel’s S.r.l. (with the name implying, perhaps, a tribute), a company whose legal representative and majority shareholder with a 95% share, is another brother of the Cardinal, Professor Mario Becciu, who teaches psychology at the Salesian University in Rome. The company's formal mission, however, is totally unrelated with his undisputable academic skills. Curiously enough, it operates in the food & beverage industry, providing specialized distribution and consultancy services and setting up automated systems and commercial beer and drinks drafting machinery for the hospitality industry. Leveraging on the solidarity market, as does Tonino Becciu's cooperative SPES, Mario Becciu's company produces and bottles Birra Pollicina, a beer currently not on the market and of which there is no mention in commercial beer distribution channels. It is only to be found in select food venues to which ecclesiastical bodies direct its distribution. All these managers, when asked about how this worked, jointly stated that the lead to purchase Angel's S.r.l.’s products came straight from Cardinal Becciu or people in his inner circle. Some available promotional literature states that production of Pollicina beer involves and helps the disadvantaged. Among them are people with atypical development issues, it reads, and, in particular, many with an autistic syndrome condition. Informally, however, we were told that Pollicina is just a reseller of the product, and that they do not know which co-operative or association is in charge of carrying out said professional training, given that the business official records show that the company has a warehouse in the outskirts of Tivoli (in the Rome region) in addition to its registered office in Rome, in via Ignazio Ciampi.

It is intended that part of the proceeds from the beer sales go to Caritas Rome, an organization that does not appear to have an official partnership with the business, as would be common practice. Angel’s S.r.l. it is thus a medium-large organization, with a healthy annual turnover, the core of which bears zero-risk and is guaranteed by the good offices of Cardinal Becciu. The business has a sizeable cash flow, like all its industry peers, but owing to the lack of transparency in such strong cash flows, Angel’s S.r.L.’s is difficult to track and trace.
This is yet another conflict of interest that bears no legal consequences currently, but keeps generating a trail of profits. According to some of our sources in the financial industry, the substantial proceeds that the businesses of Cardinal Becciu’s brothers generate, appear to have been subsequently invested in safe-haven holdings, financial companies and stock shares, all legit low-risk investments paying a good income. The investment funds where the money appears to have landed had been already tested out with other operations by the Secretariat of State under Cardinal Becciu, as the records we obtained show.

During the years for which we perused the documents, we found that some investment funds were used on a regular basis. Some are domiciled in Luxembourg, others in Asia, as is the case of Chinese B/H packages; others still in Malta through the Centurion Fund, whose manager, once again, is Enrico Crasso—he is the one, by the way, who discreetly introduced Lorenzo Vangelisti to Cardinal Becciu. CEO of Valeur Group, an independent asset management, advisory, trading. research and real estate group with headquarters in Lugano, Switzerland, Vangelisti was one of the parties, together with Alessandro Noceti, the director of Valeur capital and a former Credit Swiss London man, involved in the property ownership deal of the Sloane Avenue building.
A former consultant with this organization, whom we met in recent days, explained how Valeur Group, by using shell organizations “guaranteed, in the past, a substantial ability to conceal the Secretariat of State’s institutional investments as such and their transit. The acquisition of the London building is the last chapter of a number of investments the Holy See managed badly with the result of losing substantial money—hundreds of millions of euros. This is not just the consequence of bad management, but of a real plan concocted behind Pope Francis’ back, by which Cardinal Becciu prioritized having his private interests managed and kept in Crasso and Vangelisti’s hands, rather than conforming to an unambiguous Vatican policy.”

“Vangelisti and Noceti, the lead parties in the London affair", the former Valeur Group consultant explained, "are afraid of being tracked down by Vatican authorities, not because of wrongdoings of sorts, being that speculation is their job, but because they know well that if someone pulls a thread in this story, all could be revealed—and the money stemming from the London speculative deal is still in their company’s safes, as are the cuts all the parties involved in the affair pocketed, and the personal financial assets that each of them transferred there in past years.”

In the framework of this scheme, the realness of which is backed by documents and financial records, the Sloane Avenue building affair in London was the last outcome of a way of managing the Vatican financial assets: pathogens, cross-interests and conflicts of interest were so apparent that such operations could happen on a regular basis. This story is about a realm in which lawyers, fixers and white-collar workers, who over the years kept money circulating through a network of investment funds and companies which kept their financial assets in tax havens, guaranteed that the private businesses of Cardinal Becciu and his family stayed confidential, and brought about a blackmail mechanism that opened up a hole of 454 million euros.

Such a modus operandi is not a one-off. It has illustrious precedents in the history of the smallest state in the world. Differently from the past, this time internal control actions led to investigations and arrests in a timely manner, unlike in the decades past. The result owes too to the new anti-corruption rules Francesco strongly pushed for.

It is also the reason why Gian Franco Mammì, the director of the Institute for the Works of Religion, following a request of 150 million euros from Becciu with the blurry motive of “institutional reasons," immediately went to see the Pontiff and asked him if he was aware of all his Secretariat deputy’s bank transfer operations, both those regarding the London building, and those related to the growing influence of Enrico Crasso on how Peter’s Pence funds were invested.

Pope Francis at that point called for an iron fist against the corrupt and corrupters: "I want clarity on every aspect, the recovery of the money for the poor, the prison for those who committed mistakes.” From that moment on, the promoters of justice, the intelligence and the anti-corruption bodies are doing their best to complete the picture and “get rid of the stench of corruption” in the Vatican. For good.