The Church under accusation for illegal telephone interceptions. Pope Francis has in fact been reported to the UN for alleged interference in the investigations involving the financier Raffaele Mincione, who was tried for fraud in the Vatican in relation to the London palace affair and ended up the victim of the Anti-Mafia files. The news was broken by the Telegraph newspaper, which revealed how the Pontiff is now the subject of the United Nations investigation into his personal authorization of alleged illegal telephone tapping during the Vatican investigation into alleged corruption in the sale of the luxury property in Sloane £300m Avenue in the center of the UK capital. Raffaele Mincione’s lawyers, in fact, have presented the complaint to the UN for alleged abuses committed during the trial by Pope Francis, spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics around the world. Rodney Dixon KC, a prominent human rights lawyer, accused the Pope of personally authorizing illegal wiretaps of Mincione’s phone during investigations into alleged wrongdoing at the Vatican. During the trial it emerged that Bergoglio gave special powers to investigators, allowing investigators to tap phones, steal emails and make arrests, outside the Papal State, without approval from a judge.
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The powers through which it would have been possible to carry out the alleged abuses would be the “rescripts”, ancient laws that the Pope could use as divine monarch of the Vatican. In the complaint forwarded to Professor Margaret Satterthwaite, United Nations special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Dixon defined the Pope as the “author” of human rights violations. “This unreasonable authorization of prosecutors by an absolute monarch gave the green light to initiate surveillance without the articulation of precise reasons, ongoing judicial or other independent and impartial oversight, or a mechanism through which to challenge the ‘implementation of surveillance before an independent and impartial tribunal,’ Dixon told the Telegraph. The Vatican claims Mincione defrauded the Holy See by inflating the price of a £124m investment in a former Harrods warehouse in Chelsea via a fund managed by Mincione. In addition to the financier, prosecutors have accused ten other people of fraud, embezzlement and abuse of office, including Cardinal Angelo Becciu, former right-hand man of Pope Francis.
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The financier proclaims his innocence, maintains that the property was appropriately valued by independent experts and specifies that the Vatican has never presented evidence capable of proving money losses, nor to support the accusations. Last December, Mincione was found guilty of violating canonical, or spiritual, law and was sentenced to five and a half years in prison by the Vatican tribunal. He and his legal team say the financier is the victim of a “witch hunt” and that the trial was staged to secure a conviction. “My fundamental rights have been trampled upon and ignored,” Mincione told the Telegraph. “How can it be right that I have been given criminal sanctions for violating spiritual law that applies only to members of the Church, which does not appear to apply to anyone other person who manages the Vatican’s investments, and about whom I knew nothing?”. For its part, the Vatican reiterated that it had acted in compliance with the law. “The legitimacy of the investigations and the correspondence of the Vatican judicial system to the principles of due process it has been recognized by several foreign courts”, underlined by the Holy See.
