Cardinal Pell: “Will he just tell us what the money was sent for?”

The National Catholic Register holds this interesting interview with Cardinal Pell:

During a visit this month to St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California, Cardinal Pell spoke with Register senior editor Joan Frawley Desmond about the spiritual impact of incarceration, his decision to forgive his accuser and the Vatican financial corruption trial that may be linked to his own case.

You left your position as the inaugural prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy to stand trial in Australia, suspending your campaign to reform the Vatican’s financial system. Later, you learned that significant sums of money were transferred to Australia around the time of your arraignment in 2017. Are you confident that these allegations will come up in the Vatican trial?

I’m not confident of anything with the Vatican trial. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not even entirely sure that it will go ahead. It might fail for legal reasons.

There’s no doubt that 2,300,000 [Australian dollars] was sent from the Vatican to Australia. Cardinal Becciu acknowledged that.

We just received the available recordings of the [Vatican] trial, and it looks as though Msgr. [Alberto] Perlasca, [the longtime investment manager for the Vatican], said under interrogation that the money was sent to the bishops’ conference in Australia for my legal defense. That’s certainly not true. We’ve asked the bishops’ conference, they received nothing. We certainly received nothing.

So I have one question for Cardinal Becciu: “Will he just tell us what the money was sent for?” And if it’s nothing to do with me or for entirely innocent purposes, good, I would be quite pleased, and we can get on with our lives.

What did you know about the London property scandal when you served as prefect?

I didn’t know a great deal when I went home. We did know the Secretary of State would not give us access to their records, and would not let the auditors in. We also knew they made an accounting error on the London property, which had the effect of masking it. We picked that up.

But we were entirely ignorant of the debacle that was developing.

You were so close when you had to go back and stand trial.

If the auditors had been allowed in, if we’d been allowed in, this would have been one of the first things [they would have flagged]. The [Vatican] would not have lost so much money.

We would never have agreed to the deal, explicitly written up in the contract, whereby they paid millions to get hold of the 30,000 shares for what they thought would give them ownership of the [London] building. In fact, there were 1,000 shares remaining that had all the voting rights, and I understand they had to pay [an additional] 15 million euros to get hold of those shares.

Read the full interview here.

The audit Pell refers to above happened in 2015. When the accounting firm Price Waterhouse Coopers began uncovering financial fraud in the Church, Becciu suspended its audit. There's a really useful timeline of the whole thing in The Pillar see here. The auditor general from PwC later said he was forced out on trumped-up accusations; Becciu accused that accountant of being a spy, here reported by the Telegraph. Cardinal Pell was shipped back to Australia on trumped up charges and Francis then made Becciu a cardinal. Becciu was one of Francis's leading advisers, already deeply implicated in corruption when the Pope disgracefully made him a cardinal.