VATICAN CITY
International Business Times
By UMBERTO BACCHI: August 12, 2013
The Holy See has been embarrassed by claims that Pope Francis’s new PR had accused a senior cleric of corruption and said that Pope Benedict XVI had leukaemia in tweets she made before she got the job.
The Vatican has reportedly launched an inquiry into the hiring of Francesca Chaouqui, 30, who was appointed as PR officer for a new papal committee set up to overhaul the Vatican’s financial administration in July.
Before securing the job, Chaouqui had extensively tweeted about Vatican affairs, often not mincing her words, giving rise to speculation that she had access to some degree of confidential information.
In a tweet in March Chaouqui described the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, as corrupt and claimed that he was involved in dubious business deals with an unnamed company from the Veneto region.
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