Osservatore Romano/Handout/Reuters
ROME—The man hired to clean up the Vatican’s messy banking debacle in 2015 says he was threatened and robbed and forced to resign. Libero Milone, the former CEO of Deloitte in Italy, was handpicked by Pope Francis to sift through years of murky book work to try to bring the Vatican Bank into compliance with international norms on money laundering. But he was forced out in 2017 amid allegations he was spying on clerics, a claim he denies.
Milone and his assistant have now filed a $9.25 million lawsuit against the Vatican, saying they were falsely investigated, stolen from, and harassed for doing the job the pope hired them to do. “We did the right thing, we never spied, we have been honest, we did what we had to do, but unfortunately what we had to do was very embarrassing,” Milone told Vaticanisti reporters in Rome after the suit was filed. “I didn’t know that I would find cardinals putting money in their pocket, but I found it. And I told [the pope].”
Milone was pushed out in 2017 by Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the Vatican’s former secretary of state, who Francis fired in 2021 after he was embroiled in a scandal of his own, accused of funneling $800,000 of the pope’s charity money for nefarious purposes, including allegedly buying false testimony against Australian Cardinal George Pell, who was convicted and acquitted of sex crimes. Pell was the Vatican’s no. 3 who ran the business affairs of the city state until his departure to fight sex charges back home.