‘Animal Farm’: Vatican Judges Instructs Former Auditor-General To Drop ‘Immoral’ Misconduct Evidence

Libero Milone, who worked closely with the late Cardinal George Pell in uncovering huge fraud in the Vatican, was told to drop ‘indecent’ evidence of misconduct by high-ranking officials.

In an extraordinary move, Vatican judges have told the Church’s former auditor-general, Libero Milone, who worked closely with the late Cardinal George Pell in uncovering hundreds of millions of euros of fraud, to drop evidence of “immoral and indecent’’ misconduct by high-ranking Vatican officials that could damage their “good name’’.

Mr Milone’s lawyers presented the evidence, much of which is well established already, as part of his €9 million (AU$15.5m) termination case against the Vatican, after it ignored his attempts to reach an out-of-court settlement.

“The Vatican’s defence is absurd,’’ a senior Church official told The Australian from Rome on Thursday night Australian time. “What ‘good name’ are they referring to? On what planet do they live?

“Their own justice system accused and convicted several of their “good name” people, religious and lay, with whom Libero had to deal daily.

“Nowhere in the civilised world can such a thing happen without consequences.’’

One of the passages ordered to be removed from Mr Milone’s evidence was a confidential memo written in 2016 by Cardinal Pell, when he was prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy. The memo referred to “insurmountable hostility’’ at APSA towards adopting professional accounting standards to remedy practices that were “completely irregular and heavily damaging to the Holy See’’.

Mr Milone told The Australian he would not be withdrawing the evidence. If the Court of Appeal threw his case out when the hearing resumed on May 6 he would take his case to the Vatican’s highest court, the Vatican City’s Court of Cassation.

Continue reading at The Australian
 


 

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