The Holy See is being sued for damages in the amount of 9.3 million euros ($9.25 million) by the first auditor general and his deputy of the Vatican, who were hired in 2015 and fired two years later. They claim their termination was motivated by financial irregularities they had discovered.
The legal team representing Libero Milone and Ferruccio Panicco filed the case with the Vatican prosecutor’s office last week; on Thursday, Matteo Bruni, the pair’s attorney, said he had no further comment.
Pope Francis appointed Milone, 74, a former chairman and CEO of Deloitte in Italy, to lead the Vatican’s financial reforms and bring accounting standards up to par with global standards of transparency and accountability. Milone was chosen in 2015.
He was given the order to resign in 2017 by Cardinal Archbishop Angelo Becciu, who at the time was the second-in-command of the Vatican’s most important division, the Secretariat of State.
Becciu told Reuters in 2017 that Milone “went against all the standards and was intruding into the private lives of his bosses and colleagues, including me.”
Milone disputes this, saying that he was only looking for information that he had a right to review in his capacity as auditor general.
Milone said, “We did the right thing, we never spied, we have been honest, and we did what we had to do,” during a meeting at his lawyers’ offices in Rome. Sadly, what we were required to do was really embarrassing.