A Vatican II official said Pope Francis agreed to pay the ransom for the
nun
Written byTimes Magazine
A second senior Holy See official told a Vatican court on Friday that Pope Francis had approved a ransom worth hundreds of thousands of euros to free a nun kidnapped by al-Qaeda-affiliated militants in Mali. Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra, No. 3 of the Holy See, told the Vatican court he had asked Francis for permission to transfer the money shortly after he took up his "backup" job at the Secretariat of State in late 2018.
,
Pena Parra Day Two took questions on Friday after being called by defense attorneys representing 10 people on trial over a series of alleged financial crimes.
One strand of the Vatican lawsuit concerns the transfer of €575,000 from a Swiss Vatican bank account to a Slovenian front company owned by Cecilia Marogny, a self-proclaimed outside consulting analyst.
Becciu told the court last year that he sought Marona's advice in 2017 after Gloria's sister Cecilia Narvaez was kidnapped by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which had funded an insurgency by kidnapping westerners. During his captivity in Mali, the group regularly showed Narvaez on video asking the Vatican for help. Becciu told the court that Francis approved up to 1 million euros for the Colombian nun's release.
Becciu said he and Marogna traveled to London in
to meet and then hired British security firm Inkerman to find Narvaez and secure his freedom. She was eventually released in October 2021.
In their prosecution application, prosecutors alleged a double payment: they said around £500,000, or €575,000 at the time, for the transaction was transferred to Inkerman's account at Barklays Bank.
Separately, they listed nine payments from a Swiss Vatican account totaling €575,000, made to Logsic DOO in Marrogna between December 20, 2018 and July 8, 2019. Citing bank statements from Slovenia, prosecutors say Marogna used that money to buy high-end luxury goods.
and go on vacation.
Becciu and Marrogna are accused of embezzlement, both deny.
Pena Parra, who replaced Becciu as "deputy", told the court he had been asked by his deputy, Bishop Alberto Perlasca, to deposit into a Slovenian account that Becciu asked for a bank transfer. But Pena Parra said he could not proceed without first obtaining the Pope's approval.
For his part, Becciu insisted in an impromptu statement in court on Friday that Francesco had authorized the surgery and was willing to write a statement about it in Beccius' defense when they spoke by phone on July 19, 2021, days before the trial began. .
The public prosecutor recently reported an exchange of letters between Becciu and Francesco in the following days, in which Francesco refused to testify. Becciu produced a letter Friday showing that Francis himself had asked Becciu to submit a draft statement in
, and the cardinal suggested that his subsequent refusal to sign it appeared worded.
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