Testimony that Vatican officials engaged in corporate espionage sheds new light on the breakdown of the London property deal.

Newsroom (07/02/2022 5:45 PM Gaudium Press) Luciano Capaldo is a property developer who was closely involved in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State plans for the London London property deal at 60 Sloane Avenue.

During an April 2021 interview with Vatican investigators, he explained that he had agreed to help officials at the Secretariat of State spy on Gianluigi Torzi, the broker engaged by them to finalize the purchase of the building from Raffaele Mincione in 2018.

Capaldo told investigators that he had access to surveillance cameras inside Torzi’s offices for some time. So he passed information and images to Monsignor Mauro Carlino, a former official at the Secretariat of State currently indicted for extortion and abuse of office.

The access, Capaldo said, came via a mobile phone app for which he had the login details.

Capaldo can be seen in a video interview, published over the weekend by the newspaper Corriere della Sera, identifying photos that he says were “taken from the cameras that are inside Torzi’s office.”

Asked why he was in possession of surveillance footage from inside Torzi’s office, he responded that he had the photos “because they were required.”

“Required by whom?” investigators can be heard asking.

“By the Secretariat of State,” Capaldo replies, “by Monsignor Carlino in particular. Perhaps they already had doubts about Torzi. They already had doubts … They were trying to negotiate the operation with Torzi, trying to end it.”

Capaldo told investigators that he lost access to the video feed after a falling out with Torzi.

When investigators questioned him last year, Capaldo also recounted that he put Carlino in touch with an “IT security expert” he knew after Carlino suspected electronic surveillance.

“I have problems with the computer, I think that someone has interfered with my mail and my mobile phone, I’m a little worried,” Capaldo remembered Carlino saying.

Several days after Capaldo put Carlino in touch with the “security expert” identified only as “Gianni” in the tape, the priest sent Capaldo the number of a director of the IOR. The IOR is the Vatican bank that flagged loan applications from the Secretariat of State, triggering the investigation into the London deal in 2019.

“You can pass this phone number to Gianni,” Carlino allegedly told Capaldo.

Capaldo speculated that Carlino might have thought IOR officials were tapping him.

Capaldo’s cooperation with Vatican officials to spy on Torzi sheds new light on a question that has remained murky throughout the Vatican’s involvement with the London property purchase: Why was he left in a position of influence over the building project? Even after Torzi’s 2020 arrest.

Months after several secretariat officials, including Carlino, were removed from the board of the London registered holding company through which the Vatican controlled the building, Capaldo remained as the only listed director, giving him sole control over the company.

Torzi may have tried to get Italian intelligence dossiers on several Vatican officials

The newly released tapes also include a Vatican interview of Marco Simeon, a layman known in the Italian press as “Becciu’s lobbyist” due to his ties to the disgraced cardinal.

The interview includes Simeon’s account of Torzi’s efforts to spy on businessmen involved in the London property deal and even convince Italian intelligence officials to give them information on two Vatican employees and Cardinal Angelo Becciu.

Simeon, together with Becciu, helped front a group offering to repurchase the London building from the Secretariat as the Vatican investigation gathered steam, allegedly as a means of shutting down prosecutors’ efforts to file charges.

During an August 2020 interview, Simeon asked prosecutors if he could talk with them about an allegation he had heard about Torzi — one which “left me perplexed,” he explained.

“Off the record,” Simeon said in English, before explaining that, “since I also have fairly good relations with the world of Italian intelligence…Mr. Torzi intervened with an officer who is part of a service, and told him he wanted information on a certain Crasso, a certain Simeon, a certain Becciu…”

“I’m sorry, what?” the investigator can be heard saying.

“Torzi moved last week to ask for information through a … an [intelligence] officer… to ask for information about me, Becciu, Crasso and – it seems – Tirabassi, understand? 

When the person asked him, ‘Why do you want to know?’ he replied, ‘because I work for the Holy Father.’ I was very perplexed.”

Simeon said once he had heard the account of Torzi angling for information from Italian intelligence agencies secondhand, he was “perplexed” enough about the whole thing to raise it with prosecutors.

The reference to “a certain Crasso” likely refers to Enrico Crasso, a former investment manager for the Secretariat of State who, among other business ventures, induced the Secretariat of State to invest in the Elton John biopic Rocketman and in a supposed highway development in North Carolina which did not exist.

Cardinal Becciu attempted to conceal a 500,000 euro Vatican payment to Cecilia Marogna

The tapes also contain an interview with Msgr. Alberto Perlasca, former deputy of Cardinal Becciu — and point to Becciu’s suspect payments from Vatican accounts to his “private spy” Cecilia Marogna, who is also on trial.

In an interview published January 29, Perlasca can be heard recounting a discussion he had with Becciu about the testimony he had already given to prosecutors — including prosecutors’ questions about Becciu’s payments to Marogna.

“When you reported to Cardinal Becciu the magistrates’ questions regarding these transfers to Signora Marogna, what did the cardinal tell you?” Perlasca was asked on the tape.

“The cardinal told me 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,” Perlasca told investigators.

“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.”

Among other crimes, Becciu has been charged with attempting to compel Perlasca to commit perjury by recanting testimony regarding the cardinal’s financial affairs, namely the suspicious payments to Marogna.

Perlasca was asked by prosecutors whether, during the meeting with Becciu at a fashionable Roman restaurant, either he or the cardinal had expressed concern that Vatican investigators might be recording their conversation. “Ah, ah! Yes, yes!” Perlasca responded.

“Nothing was done, mind you,” the Vatican investigator can be heard telling Perlasca. “That is, we do not go to do any kind of activity in Italy.”

The Vatican trial is set to resume on February 18, 2022

(With files from The Pillar, compiled by Saju Hasmukh)