The five-and-a-half-year sentence of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, accused of fraud and embezzlement, has been overturned in the first instance. The trial must be retried.
The Vatican Court of Appeal's decision, which declared the proceedings "relatively null" and ordered a "renewal of the hearing," is a real dramatic turn of events.
The judges ordered that all documents and records from the preliminary investigation be filed with the court registry, setting June 22 as the date for the parties to appear to establish the hearing schedule.
The Court specifies in the order that "it does not declare the overall nullity of the entire first-instance proceedings, the trial, or the sentence," which "maintain their effects." But the effect of the decision, in essence, is this: everything must be redone .
The defense of the cardinal and the other convicted persons in the trial for the management of the funds of the Secretariat of State had requested in appeal that the judgment be declared null and void because "the Promoter of Justice (the Vatican Prosecutor, ed.) had made an incomplete deposit of the findings of the preliminary investigation; some documents had then been reproduced with redactions and not in their full version."
The defense also contested that Pope Francis' Rescripta, with which he had modified the rules by derogating from the procedural code, had not been "published in a timely manner."
The Court of Appeal's order notes that this is an unprecedented situation because "the Vatican judges' rulings do not contain any precedents that refer to the partial filing of the preliminary investigation file or the filing of documents partially redacted." However , the "principle of full knowledge of all documents collected during the preliminary investigation by the accused and his defense counsel" is clearly not respected . Hence the decision of "relative nullity," because "a fundamental act of the trial, namely the summons," has been vitiated and now "has the effect that the Court of Appeal must uphold the judgment and order a new hearing before it."
Thus, at the end of the 16-page order, the Vatican Court of Appeal, citing Article 495 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, "orders a rehearsal; orders the Office of the Promoter of Justice to deposit with the registry, by April 30, 2026, all the documents from the preliminary investigation conducted in their entirety ; grants the parties until June 15, 2026, to examine the documents and prepare their defense evidence; sets the hearing for June 22, 2026, at 9:00 a.m., for the parties to appear for the sole purpose of establishing the schedule for the next hearings."
Fabio Viglione and Maria Concetta Marzo, the cardinal's lawyers, expressed their satisfaction: "The Court of Appeal's ruling upheld our objections. It demonstrates that we were right from the outset to note the violation of the right to defense and to demand compliance with the law in order to conduct a fair trial."
(Unioneonline)