Vatican Bank

[Jan Klimkowski]

Opus Dei is investigating.

Nothing to see here then... Move along....

Pope's butler charged over leaked Vatican letters

Paolo Gabriele charged with illegal possession of documents after whistleblowing book alleges corruption at Holy See

Damien Pearse and Tom Kington in Rome

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 26 May 2012 13.48 BST


The pope's butler has been formally charged over suspicions he leaked a large number of confidential letters addressed to Benedict XVI which have lifted the lid on alleged corruption and nepotism at the Holy See.

Vatican magistrates charged Paolo Gabriele, 46, with illegal possession of secret documents and said a wider investigation would take place to see if he had any accomplices who helped him leak them.

Gabriele, who has worked as Benedict's butler since 2006, was taken into custody after investigators reportedly found a mass of documents in the Vatican apartment he shares with his wife and three children.

The arrest comes a month after the Vatican gave an investigative team led by Cardinal Julián Herranz, a member of Opus Dei, a full "pontifical mandate" to join Vatican police in rooting out the perpetrators of what has been dubbed Vatileaks.

Gabriele is a member of the 85-year-old pontiff's closest circle of helpers, assisting him in his papal apartment at the Vatican alongside four female members of the Italian religious movement Comunione e Liberazione who cook and clean.

The Rome-born butler is in custody in the Vatican's cells.

"We have cells," said a Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi. "It is a simple structure, since this is a small state, but we have them."

Among the most serious leaks published this year is a letter from Carlo Maria Viganò, the former deputy governor of Vatican City, denouncing inflated contracts with friendly companies, false invoicing and missing cash.

Further revelations were published this week in a book by a journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, who described how an unnamed whistleblower sent emissaries to sound him out before they held secret meetings in an unfurnished rented flat near the Vatican. "I wore a USB round my neck for six months with the leaked documents on it," Nuzzi said. "It was like something out of a film."

In the book, the source says he was coming clean because "hypocrisy within the Vatican goes unchallenged and scandals multiply".

The book, which was described as criminal by the Vatican, alleged that the editor of the Vatican's newspaper started a gay smear campaign against a rival editor, with the help of a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family.

Letters depict collusion between the Berlusconi government and the Vatican over how to avoid EU pressure to make the Catholic church pay tax on its properties.

Huge cash donations to the pope from banks and a TV presenter are described, as well as a €100,000 (£80,000) truffle sent by a businessman which was donated to the poor.

"After Pope John Paul II's death I started putting aside copies of some documents that came into my possession thanks to my work," the source told Nuzzi.

"Initially I did it sporadically. When I saw that the truth coming out in the newspapers and official speeches did not match the truth in the documents I put everything aside in a folder to try and investigate and understand."

The source said his growing disenchantment with the "personal interests and hidden truths" at the Vatican was shared by other people living and working in the city state, but "nobody knows who all the others are".

The letters show the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in a bad light but spare the pope. "The source backed Benedict's reforming spirit. The problem is that the pope has not been able to achieve things very quickly," said Nuzzi.

Marco Tosatti, a Vatican expert at La Stampa newspaper, said: "I don't believe they would have arrested him if they didn't have real proof, but I believe he is not the only guilty one. I imagine he will go before an Italian court and risks 20 years for stealing correspondence from a head of state."

Other letters reveal a row over improving transparency at the Vatican bank after it was implicated in the 1980s in the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano whose chairman, Roberto Calvi, was found hanging under London Bridge.

On Thursday, the Vatican bank's president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who was brought in to improve transparency, was ousted "for not having carried out various responsibilities of primary importance regarding his office," the Vatican said in a statement.