It reads like the plot of a Dan Brown potboiler: a high-ranking Vatican official embezzling, money-laundering and bribing, casting a net of corruption all the way to Australia. A Cardinal on the brink of exposing the whole, dark web is brought down by false charges of child molesting.
Unlike Brown’s best-selling hack-work, though, this is all true.
And the scandal is only just getting its legs.
Australian Federal Police have been working with Vatican investigators for some time over suspect transfers of money to Australia of more than $2 million related to allegations some of the money was intzended to adversely affect the trial of Cardinal George Pell.
What begin as scarcely-credible whispers is rapidly taking solid form. The supposed bribery has moved up from “allegations” in Italian newspapers to official Australian investigations into “potential criminal charges”.
Australia’s ambassador to the Holy See in Rome has been “monitoring” the Vatican investigations into money laundering, embezzlement, extortion and fraud within the Catholic Church including sensational allegations of money transfers to Australia.
But the Australian Federal Police have taken the lead role in investigating the claims of suspect transfers to Australia and have asked the Department of Foreign Affairs to refer any matters relating to the “potential criminal charges”.
The AFP has also used Australia’s embassy in the Rome to provide connections to Vatican investigators[…who]have also been told of attempts to interfere in the sexual abuse prosecutions against Cardinal Pell to deflect him from financial reforms and anti-corruption steps he was taking at the Vatican from 2014.
NSW Liberal Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells has received confirmation from DFAT that the Australian embassy at the Vatican and the AFP are on the case. Austrac, Australia’s international financial watchdog, has also confirmed that it is investigating transfers of millions of dollars allegedly to an Australian company in Victoria.
Austrac[…]confirmed in Senate Estimates it had examined allegations of suspicious transfers from the Vatican to Australia and passed “actionable financial intelligence” to the AFP and Victoria Police.
AFP also confirmed it was investigating the transfers and had passed information to the Victorian anti-corruption watchdog, IBAC, which looks at serious corruption across the Victoria public service.
Vatican authorities investigating allegations of embezzlement and money laundering have been given details of financial transfers to Australia between February 2017 and June 2018 totalling more than $2 million.
The international transfers from the Vatican[…were] sent to allegedly adversely influence the trial of Cardinal Pell in relation to allegations of sexual abuse of two choir boys in Melbourne in the 1990s.
So, multiple government watchdogs and the Feds are on the case. Investigations are looking at corruption in Victoria’s public service. Allegations are made that people were bribed to secure a conviction against Pell. Journalist Andrew Bolt has raised the issue of a house purchase by someone, he claims, who shouldn’t have been able to afford it.
Yet much of the media, who spent years vilifying and hounding Cardinal Pell, are so far running silent on this. The taxpayer-funded ABC, whose journalists have for years fallen over themselves to promote the wildest allegations against Pell, most notably of all.
The truth will out, no matter how badly the media try to hide it.
Pell was on the trail of Becciu’s dirty money, before his downfall was engineered. The BFD. Photoshop by Lushington Brady.
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