Vatican City’s Office of the Promoter of Justice has launched a joint investigation with Italian prosecutors over alleged illegal use of computer systems and databases to search for information on individuals connected with the London property scandal.
Promoter of Justice Alessandro Diddi and head of the Vatican City Corps of Gendarmes met Sept. 17 with the chief and deputy of the public prosecutor's office in Perugia, according to a release from the Holy See press office on Tuesday.
The Vatican confirmed the meeting included the opening of a joint investigation between the two jurisdictions, which it called “necessary” as part of a broader Italian criminal probe into alleged misuse and illegal accessing of the SIVA and SERPICO systems.
Speaker Identification and Verification Archives is a database of recorded phone calls and audio files used for voice identification research purposes. SERPICO — Systematic Evidence Recording, Processing and Interpretations of Crime Occurrences — is an international database used by law enforcement agencies to track crime related information and identify patterns of suspicious behavior.
The collaboration between Italian and Vatican law enforcement marks a new focus in the investigation which began earlier this year, when prosecutors in Perugia filed documents on alleged illegal searches conducted on SIVA and SERPICO.
Prosecutors have identified a slate of suspects, led by an officer in the Italian Guardia di Finanza, alleged to have abused access to the systems to search for information on dozens of individuals — including four people involved in the Vatican Secretariat of State’s London property scandal and resulting trial.
Raffaele Mincione, Gianluigi Torzi, Cecilia Margona, and Fabrizio Tirabassi all featured in illegal searches conducted on the systems in 2019 and 2020. Alll four were subsequently convicted in the landmark financial trial last year.
According to prosecution filings, the searches were used to look for notices of suspicious financial transactions, as well as personal data, including income reports and tax filings.
While prosecutors have not, as yet, alleged on whose behalf the illegal searches were made, the dates of the data breaches began in July 2019, the same month that Pope Francis authorized Vatican law enforcement to commence electronic surveillance of officials at the Secretariat of State and other departments as part of an investigation into the London property deal which exploded into public scandal several months later.
The Vatican investigation was beset by difficulties.
In October 2019, raids carried out by Vatican City Gendarmes on offices of the Financial Information Authority resulted in the watchdog being suspended from the Edgemont Group, an international network of financial oversight bodies, over data confidentiality concerns.
Both the AIF’s president and director were indicted for abuse of office in the case, and received fines.
That same month, the head of the Vatican police force, Domenico Giani, was forced to resign after a confidential memo was leaked to the press identifying four Secretariat of State officials who had been suspended as part of the investigation.
Apart from the official investigation, the years-long trial also laid bare the seemingly habitual use of illegal electronic surveillance and private spies by senior officials at the Secretariat of State, and the timing of the alleged illegal searches overlaps with admitted actions by the current sostituto at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra.
The archbishop told a Vatican City court last year that in 2019 he authorized illegal electronic surveillance of senior Vatican banking officials in retaliation for their refusal to approve major loans.
The same businessman, Luciano Capaldo, told the judges that he was asked by Peña Parra’s secretary, Msgr. Mauro Carlino, to help arrange surveillance of the offices of Gianluigi Torzi, the middle man hired by the Secretariat of State to purchase the London building at 60 Sloane Avenue from Raffaele Mincione.
Illegal database searches for information related to Capaldo were also discovered by prosecutors in Perugia and for part of their developing case.
And tapes heard during the trial also included a Vatican interview of Marco Simeon, a layman known in the Italian press as “Becciu’s lobbyist” because of his ties to the disgraced cardinal, who was sentenced to more than five years in prison in December.
The interview includes Simeon’s account of Gianluigi Torzi’s efforts to spy on other businessmen involved in the Vatican’s London property deal, and even to convince Italian intelligence officials to give them information on two Vatican employees and on Cardinal Angelo Becciu.
During an August 2020 interview, Simeon told Vatican prosecutors “off the record” that he had “fairly good relations with the world of Italian intelligence,” and that “Mr. Torzi intervened with an officer who is part of a service, and told him he wanted information on… a certain Becciu.”
That effort to buy back the building was characterized by Pope Francis as an attempt to subvert the process of justice in private letters to Becciu turned over to the Vatican court during the trial.
The would-be purchasers were fronted by Giancarlo Inncenzi Botti, an Italian businessman who was also the subject of illegal database searches, according to Italian prosecutors’ filings.
