In a letter to a veteran Italian journalist, Cardinal Angelo Becciu wrote Monday that he was not involved in the purchase of a bankrupt Italian hospital and that reports to the contrary are unreliable.
“The press release of Prof. Antonio Maria Leozappa, president of the Luigi Maria Monti Foundation, published by you on November 28, reconstructs with exact precision the story of the IDI and, by confirming what was previously said by Card. Parolin, exonerates me completely from any involvement, contrary to what you have asserted,” Becciu wrote in a Dec. 2 letter to journalist Sandro Magister.
The press release to which Becciu referred came from the president of a legal partnership between the Vatican’s Secretariat of State and the Congregation of the Sons of the Immaculate Conception, an Italian religious order that once owned Rome’s IDI hospital. The hospital was purchased from the religious order by that partnership in 2015, with funds borrowed from the Vatican’s central bank, in violation of European regulatory agreements.
Becciu has been frequently reported to have helped arrange the loan and to have helped facilitate a controversial request for a grant from the U.S.-based Papal Foundation to repay it. Although the London property development involves multiple holding companies and ambiguous funding sources, Becciu has defended the London property deal as “accepted practice.” Parolin characterized it as “opaque,” and Pope Francis said of the transaction this month that unnamed Vatican administrators have “done things that do not seem clean.” The investment remains the subject of a major Vatican investigation. Vatican News Department
