Somewhere out in the ocean right now, a small buoy is measuring wave direction and speed, along with barometric pressure and water temperature, feeding that data back to observatories. Even small upticks or downticks may signal the first stirrings of what could become a devastating storm.
You don’t need special equipment, however, to detect warning signs right now of a legal tsunami that may be heading for the prosecution in the Vatican’s “trial of the century,” which pivots on a $400 million London real estate deal gone wrong, and, for the first time ever, features a cardinal in the dock.
On Wednesday, the penal section of the Italian Supreme Court dismissed an arrest order that had been issued at the request of Vatican prosecutors for Gianluigi Torzi, a London-based Italian financier who’s a principal defendant in the Vatican trial. Though we don’t yet have the text of the ruling, in effect the Supreme Court found the evidence submitted by the Vatican insufficient to sustain a charge.
The decision follows a similar ruling by a British judge in March, who also threw out a Vatican request for Torzi to be arrested, citing what the judge called “appalling” misrepresentations and omissions in the evidence submitted by the Vatican’s Promoter of Justice.
Read the rest at Crux