Scandal In The Vatican 2 -

The raids sent shockwaves through the Curia. Cardinals whispered in sacristies. Bishops looked nervously at their own diocesan accounts. And two names emerged from the seized documents: Cardinal Angelo Becciu and Cecilia Marogna. Cecilia Marogna was a self-styled security expert with no formal intelligence background. She claimed to have worked with NATO and the Italian secret services, but prosecutors later found little evidence of any genuine credentials. Nevertheless, Cardinal Becciu authorized payments totaling over €500,000 to Marogna’s Slovenian-registered company.

In October 2019, Vatican gendarmes, acting on a warrant from the Promoter of Justice (the Vatican’s chief prosecutor), raided the Secretariat of State and the offices of the Financial Information Authority (AIF). They seized computers, encrypted hard drives, and paper ledgers. For the first time in modern history, the Vatican had launched a criminal investigation into its own central administration. Scandal in The Vatican 2

Pope Francis has responded with sweeping reforms. He issued new apostolic letters mandating transparency for all Vatican contracts, centralized financial procurement, and forced the Secretariat of State to submit its budget to an external audit. He also opened the Vatican’s “secret archives” on the trial to journalists, a level of transparency unprecedented in papal history. The raids sent shockwaves through the Curia

When Vatican auditors finally looked into the deal in 2019, they discovered that the property had been overvalued by nearly €100 million. Worse, tens of millions had vanished into offshore accounts, “consultancy fees,” and commissions paid to brokers who had no visible role. The dominoes began to fall when Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, a straight-laced Vatican accountant, refused to sign off on the London deal. In 2019, he walked into the office of the Vatican’s newly created Auditor General, Libero Milone, and laid out the evidence. Soon after, Milone himself was forced to resign under mysterious circumstances—but not before copies of key documents left Vatican walls. And two names emerged from the seized documents:

For nearly two millennia, the Vatican has been portrayed as the unshakable fortress of faith—a city-state where divine guidance trumps human fallibility. Yet, beneath the gilded frescoes of the Apostolic Palace and the marble corridors of St. Peter’s Basilica, a different story has often unfolded. If the first great "Scandal in the Vatican" involved Medici popes, murder, and the selling of indulgences, the second great scandal—the one history may well label Scandal in The Vatican 2 —is a far more modern, yet equally labyrinthine, tale of financial fraud, espionage, secret London real estate, and a disgraced cardinal who became the richest man in Rome while wearing a Franciscan cord.