An Admission of Guilt from Cardinal Beccui

This, surely, is damning on Beccui the dodgy Cardinal sacked then reinstated by Pope Francis when he thought no one was looking:

"Interpol had flagged a series of payments totaling some 575,000 euros to Marogna’s Slovenian-registered company, which had been spent primarily on luxury goods and hotels.

According to the police investigator, Becciu offered to repay the funds from his personal account at the IOR, a Vatican bank, and asked them to keep the matter confidential because it would cause “serious harm” to the cardinal and his family."

...

"Marogna, who is charged with embezzlement during the current Vatican trial, has not presented herself in court and successfully fought against extradition to the Vatican in 2021. She claims she worked for the Secretariat of State on sensitive diplomatic cases, like those of kidnapped clergy and religious, while also boasting of work as a kind of personal spy for Becciu, gathering dossiers of information on the private moral failings of other senior Church officials.

Becciu has said that the payments to Marogna were to help secure the release of Sr. Gloria Cecilia Narváez Argoti, a Colombian religious sister abducted in 2017 by jihadist militants in Mali, and freed last year. The cardinal previously told the court that Pope Francis personally approved the payments to Marogna under strict state secrecy.

The Italian foreign ministry and intelligence services have taken credit for Narváez’ freedom and have previously rejected claims that Marogna was a joint agent for the Vatican and Italian governments."

...

"Perlasca has told Vatican investigators that Becciu ordered him to prepare large sums of cash for him and to transfer money to Marogna’s bank account, but the cardinal would not discuss the purpose of the payments and Perlasca himself did not know Marogna’s identity until it was revealed to him by prosecutors during their investigation.

Perlasca has also said that Becciu “was extremely troubled” on learning that Perlasca had discussed the payments with investigators and “became very angry with me.”

“He asked me ‘Why didn’t you eliminate the transfers [from secretariat records]?’ I said ‘Why should I have eliminated them if they were ordered by His Holiness?’”

On a separate occasion, Perlasca recounted asking Becciu what the money was for and being told “that the 500,000 we gave was more of a ‘contribution,’ because [Marogna’s] request was much higher, it was millions ... it was millions, it was three or four million, something like that.”

“I said [to Becciu] ‘Look, but how long and for what did we give her this money?’ ‘Eeeeeeh! We can talk about that in four or five years,’ he told me.”"

A must read report from the Pillar here.