ITALY
Daily Mail
By REUTERS
ROME, June 20 (Reuters) – Italian magistrates suspect a Vatican cardinal may have diverted 30 million euros in state funds destined for a children’s hospital to save a Church-owned institution and kept the operation from Pope Francis, Italian media reported on Saturday.
Both Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi and the Bambino Gesu hospital, denied any wrongdoing in separate statements.
Leading Italian newspapers said magistrates in the southern city of Trani suspected the two violated laws on inappropriate use of public funds. The southern magistrates asked their Rome colleagues to take up the investigation.
The reports were based on leaked documents from magistrates, including transcripts of police wiretaps, that emerged from another investigation into a fraudulent bankruptcy of a health institution in the south.
They said Versaldi and former Bambino Gesu President Giuseppe Profiti agreed to divert 30 million euros ($34.07 million) of the 80 million euros the Italian senate had destined for Rome’s Bambino Gesu paediatric hospital in 2014.
The magistrates suspect that the money may have gone instead to save the Istituto Dermatologico dell’ Immacolata (IDI), a dermatological clinic in Rome owned by a Catholic religious order.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.