City financier fights Vatican fraud claims which make him fear for his safety

One lesson that City financier Raffaele Mincione has learned is that the closer you get to the Roman Catholic Church, the quicker you lose your faith.

As the wealthy fund manager who became embroiled in the Vatican’s so-called “trial of the century”, Mr Mincione, 59, rues the day that he agreed to help the Holy See invest in a multi-million-pound property in London only for the Church to accuse him of fraud for allegedly artificially inflating its price.

Speaking for the first time since being handed a five-and-a-half year jail sentence by Vatican judges, he and his legal team claim that he has been the victim of a “witch-hunt” where he believes the legal goalposts were moved to secure his conviction.

He is appealing – and has won the UK Court of Appeal’s backing for a counter-action against the Vatican – but the worldwide publicity around the fraud allegations and his four-year legal battle to prove his innocence has damaged his business and, he fears, even put his safety at risk.

“At the very beginning, they were like other normal investors but after what I’ve seen in the past four years, I believe that they are totally cut-throat. At the time I did not expect it to be like this,” he says.

“I believe that if you’re a Roman Catholic, you’re a believer in the Church but your faith fades quite quickly by being too close to God, too close to the Church.

“The life that I knew is gone. I had to close my fund and give back €2.2 billion to my clients. I had to reinvent a new life. It seemed to be more about a prosecution than a fair trial. That is the biggest betrayal that the Catholic Church can do to itself.”

Mr Mincione has spent nearly all of his working life in the UK, after coming to the UK aged 18 and graduating from UCL in London. He could have been a journalist, having been offered a job at the Daily Mail, but instead chose finance after an offer from Goldman Sachs worth two and a half times a trainee reporter’s salary.

He pursued a blue-chip career that saw him rise to take responsibility for multi-billion pound portfolios. Sitting now in his office, it could have all been so different if he had heeded his father’s advice to a young Raffaele: “Never do business with the Vatican.”

“When he found out I was dealing with the Vatican, he reminded me: ‘I said do not ever deal with the Vatican’,” says Mr Mincione, who admits the whole affair has affected his wife, Maddalena, and two teenage daughters, Asia and Athena.

The fateful turn in his fortunes dates back to 2018 when he advised the Vatican to invest £124 million in a property at 60 Sloane Avenue. It was a former Harrods warehouse in London that was earmarked for development into luxury apartments and owned by a fund controlled by Mr Mincione.

The following year Mr Mincione started to read rumours in the Italian press that the Vatican was investigating him and others within the Church for fraud for allegedly inflating the price when his companies sold the property, a claim he has categorically refuted ever since it first surfaced.

When finally told that he was being charged, along with 10 others, he was stunned. “I was in total disbelief but confident that I had done nothing wrong and it was a lie, another one of those stupid things that happens in Italy all the time,” he says.

Labyrinthine case

It marked his entry into a world of intrigue where even Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, “would struggle to conceive such a labyrinthine case,” says Mr Mincione.

It emerged during the case that Pope Francis himself authorised bugging of the financier. Documents show that the Pope, the spiritual leader of 1.3 billion Catholics, handed powers to investigators allowing them to tap phones, intercept emails and arrest anyone they wanted to without approval from a judge.

The powers were based on “rescritti” – ancient laws that the Pope can use as divine monarch of the Vatican. “I order that among the powers ... is included the adoption of technological tools suitable for intercepting fixed and mobile devices, as well as any other communication, including electronic ones,” said one instruction.

During a trip to Rome, Mr Mincione’s phones and computers were seized by Vatican officials and Italian police at a hotel. The financier’s Italian lawyers complained to police that they too were put under surveillance.

The Vatican claims to have lost millions on the deal and has pursued those involved through the courts, including Cardinal Giovanni Becciu, the Pope’s former adviser, as part of a campaign by the Holy See to be more transparent and accountable.

However, Mr Mincione claims that the Vatican has never disclosed evidence to show it lost money or of his alleged wrongdoing. In particular, there was a claim, subsequently dismissed, that the money for the purchase of the Chelsea property had come from donations intended for the needy – a fund known as Peter’s Pence.

Such a toxic allegation has left Mr Mincione fearing he could be attacked in the street “by some crazy guy” because “the public perception that I’ve stolen money given to the poor is still strong.”

In 2022, Mr Mincione launched what his lawyers described as a “counter-blast” against the Vatican to clear his name by seeking to have the UK courts examine the deal. It resulted in a Court of Appeal ruling that the Holy See should face trial in the English courts for the first time in its 2,000-year history.

Public vindication

Despite Vatican lawyers saying it would interfere with the criminal investigation and “legitimate acts of a foreign state”, three Court of Appeal judges ruled Mr Mincione had a “genuine wish to obtain public vindication” and agreed that he had a “justiciable” claim in the UK courts.

That did not, however, stop the criminal investigation in Italy which in December saw not only Mr Mincione but also, for the first time, a cardinal sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail.

Mr Mincione is appealing on the basis that he was actually cleared of the criminal offences from the original indictment and only convicted of new offences introduced at the 11th hour and based on the Vatican’s canonical – religious, not criminal – law.

By being prosecuted under Canon 1284, he says it effectively raised his actions to the threshold for embezzlement under Vatican law. “I was sentenced in a very absurd way under Canonic law which doesn’t exist anywhere in the world,” he says.

“Imagine if every time a fund manager accepts money from a government, they go to jail? Every prison in every country, especially England, Switzerland and Luxembourg, will be full of these people.”

The Vatican says: “The legitimacy of the investigations and the correspondence of the Vatican judiciary system to the principles of fair trial has been recognised by various foreign courts.”

Despite having accounts frozen and handing back billions to clients, Mr Mincione continues to run a business employing 120 people. “I’m resilient,” he says. “I still am a very optimistic person. I still believe that somehow I can come out of this.”