The Vatican says it has completed the sale of the luxury London building at the center of an ongoing corruption trial – after collecting an estimated £120 million (€140 million) in damages. ).
In a statement released on Friday, the Vatican said the building had been sold for £186 million to Boston-based private investment firm Bain Capital.
However, the Vatican did not provide an exact figure of the damage it suffered in the process.
One person familiar with the various transactions over the years said it amounted to just over £120 million (€140 million).
The statement said that the losses were covered by the Vatican’s reserve fund, and emphasized that donations from the faithful in the papal fund known as Peter’s Pence had not been used.
The sale of the building, located on Chelsea’s Sloane Avenue, marks a turning point in the Vatican’s fraught investment strategy.
View of the entrance to 60 Sloane Avenue in London
It comes as a cheat test reaches its first anniversary later this month, which looks set to last at least another year.
Vatican prosecutors accused 10 people, including former Vatican official Fabrizio Tirabassi, of destroying the Holy See tens of millions of euros, and Italian broker Gianluigi Torzi then extorting 15 million euros from the Vatican. £12.8 million) for full ownership of the property. All denied wrongdoing.
In the May, Tirabassi says he is under intense “psychological pressure” to finalize a deal on the Holy See’s troubled investment in London real estate, but entering the negotiations without a lawyer and not realizing the deal leaves the Vatican with nothing in return .
Giving evidence in seven hours, he revealed that the Holy See believed it would salvage Harrod’s former warehouse investment and stem its loss.
The real estate venture began in 2014, when the Vatican’s secretariat of state invested £300 million (€350 million) with Italian broker Raffaele Mincione.
But an indictment document shows that in 2018, the Vatican thought it had been abandoned by Mincione, and instead turned to another Italian broker, Torzi, to get out of the first deal.
Pope Francis speaks at St Peter’s Square in the Vatican
Torzi has been charged by prosecutors with defrauding the Vatican and attempting to take control of the building by transferring voting shares himself.
The Vatican then offered Torzi £12.9m (£15m) to get out of the deal with him.
Tirabassi is second in the secretariat of the state administrative office, the £511 million (€600 million) wealth management body, which includes donations from the faithful to Pope Francis to be donated.
Starting around 2012, the office decided to diversify its portfolio and invested £170 million (€200 million) in a fund that invested in a London warehouse and developed it into a residential area. luxury residence.
Pope Francis stripped the secretariat of control of his own investment funds due to the embarrassing deal, and created a commission to ethically oversee his investments.
After the Vatican’s new constitution went into effect earlier this month, the commission was headed by an Irish-American cardinal but included four outside lay financial experts from Britain, Germany, Norway and the United States.
