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The leak emerged during the course of a broader, separate
Italian investigation into the actions of a financial police
official who is accused of abusively accessing a police database
and providing information from it to journalists.
According to Italian media reports, the names of four of the key
suspects in the Vatican’s trial were among hundreds of names
accessed from the Italian police database. Their data was
accessed in July of 2019, right around the time Vatican
prosecutors opened their investigation into the London property.
At the time, only a handful of people in the Vatican knew about
the investigation, including the pope, the prosecutors’ office
and the Vatican gendarmes, many of whom have ties to Italian law
enforcement since they worked there before joining the Vatican.
The Vatican’s chief prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi and the head of
the city-state’s gendarmes, Gianluca Gauzzi, met Tuesday in
Perugia with the Italian chief prosecutor, Raffaele Cantone, who
is heading up the broader Italian probe into the database case,
according to a Vatican communique.
According to the statement, the reason for the meeting was to
agree on launching a collaborative effort in the two, parallel
investigations. The Vatican probe, it said, would be into the
“alleged abusive accesses made during the course of
investigations in the well-known inquiry concerning the purchase
of the London building.”
Diddi prosecuted 10 people in connection with the London
investment and other financial crimes, and in December the
Vatican tribunal convicted nine of them, including the
once-powerful Cardinal Angelo Becciu.
The data of four of the other defendants convicted for various
charges -- Cecilia Marogna, Raffaele Mincione, Gianluigi Torzi
and Fabrizio Tirabassi -- were accessed from the Italian police
database, according to La Stampa newspaper and other media
reports. They were among hundreds of names that were accessed,
including those of top Italian politicians, business, sporting
and entertainment figures.
According to the reports, the police official who accessed the
information as well as three reporters from the Domani newspaper
are under investigation as part of the Perugia probe. The
newspaper's 2022 investigative reports on the Italian defense
minister triggered the Perugia probe.
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