In December 2023, the verdicts arrived. Cardinal Becciu was found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to five and a half years in prison. Mincione and Torzi received lighter sentences. The court ordered the confiscation of over €166 million in assets.
What was the money for? Becciu initially said it was a ransom payment to free a kidnapped Italian nun in Mali. Later, he claimed it was for intelligence gathering on Vatican enemies. Prosecutors presented a different story: text messages and invoices showed Marogna spending the money on luxury hotels, designer clothes, and a €35,000 handbag from a boutique in Milan. When Italian financial police froze her accounts, they found a note in her phone: “The Cardinal said to bill everything as ‘security consulting.’ No one checks.”
Enter Cardinal Angelo Becciu. A Sardinian with sharp eyes and sharper elbows, Becciu had risen through the diplomatic corps. By 2011, he was the Sostituto (Substitute) for General Affairs—effectively the Vatican’s chief of staff and the third-most powerful man in the Catholic Church. He controlled the purse strings. And according to Italian prosecutors, he controlled something else: a network of friends, favors, and off-book accounts that would soon unravel the Holy See. The centerpiece of Scandal in The Vatican 2 is a former Harrod’s warehouse in London’s fashionable Chelsea district. At 60 Sloane Avenue, the building was a luxury apartment block—stylish, expensive, and utterly irrelevant to the Church’s mission. Yet between 2014 and 2018, the Vatican Secretariat of State poured nearly €350 million into a complex web of funds, derivatives, and shell companies to acquire it. Scandal in The Vatican 2
Unofficially, it had become a slush fund.
Why? The official answer: a profitable investment to support Vatican charities. The real answer, according to whistleblowers and court documents: a costly gamble driven by ego, hidden commissions, and the desire to move money without oversight. In December 2023, the verdicts arrived
As one Vatican observer wrote: “The London property didn’t corrupt the Church. It merely revealed that the corruption was already there—hidden behind cassocks and canon law.”
Pope Francis, elected in 2013, inherited a system that his predecessors had either ignored or actively shielded. Pope John Paul II had delegated financial oversight to trusted lieutenants, while Pope Benedict XVI—a brilliant theologian—had little interest in ledgers and balance sheets. By the time Francis sat on the Chair of St. Peter, the Vatican Bank (IOR) was under international scrutiny for money laundering, and the Secretariat of State was operating as a sovereign wealth fund with no transparency, no auditors, and no accountability. The court ordered the confiscation of over €166
For nearly two millennia, the Vatican has been portrayed as the unshakable fortress of faith—a city-state where divine guidance trumps human fallibility. Yet, beneath the gilded frescoes of the Apostolic Palace and the marble corridors of St. Peter’s Basilica, a different story has often unfolded. If the first great "Scandal in the Vatican" involved Medici popes, murder, and the selling of indulgences, the second great scandal—the one history may well label Scandal in The Vatican 2 —is a far more modern, yet equally labyrinthine, tale of financial fraud, espionage, secret London real estate, and a disgraced cardinal who became the richest man in Rome while wearing a Franciscan cord.