George Pell sex files: police sought advice from prosecutors

AUSTRALIA
The Australian

TESSA AKERMAN
ReporterMelbourne

Victorian prosecutors were asked by police to review sex abuse claims against Cardinal George Pell but sent the file back to detectives without recommendations.

The police file was sent to the Victorian Office of Public Prosecutions in the past month but was returned by director John Champion, who advised officers any decision on charges was their call,the Herald Sun reported last night. The revelation came after the ABC broadcast statements from two men last night accusing Australia’s most senior Catholic of abusing them as boys.

Cardinal Pell, who wrote to Victoria Police in May asking if they wanted to interview him, hit back immediately. “The accusations are sheer fantasy and completely implausible,’’ he told The Australian from Rome.

It was reported in February that Victoria Police’s Sano Taskforce was investigating Cardinal Pell over allegations spanning from his time as a priest in Bal­larat in the 1970s to his time as archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s, allegations which he has strongly denied.

Cardinal Pell called for an ­investigation into the leaks at the time and claimed they was designed to cause damage to the Catholic Church and to him just a week before he was to give evidence to the child sex abuse royal commission in February.

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