Vatican investigators probing a document leak in the so-called Vatileaks 2 scandal intend to close the case before the pope's special Jubilee or Holy Year kicks off on December 8, ANSA had learned Monday. Investigators are interviewing persons of interest in the case and have identified no new suspects. High-ranking Spanish clergyman Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda and Public Relations expert Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui were detained and interrogated following a months-long investigation into the misappropriation and disclosure of classified information. Balda remains in a Vatican prison, while Chaouqui was released after she cooperated with investigators. Both the suspects served on the pope's financial reform commission.
The pope is being kept abreast of the case and all its developments, Vatican sources said.
The publication last week of two books on the Vatican based on the leaked documents drew further attention to the scandal. Extracts of Avarice: Documents Revealing Wealth, Scandals and Secrets of Francis' Church, by Italian journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi, said that officials in the Vatican's Secretariat for the Economy spent hundreds of thousands of euros on business class flights, clothes made to measure, and expensive furniture.
Fittipaldi wrote that a list of the secretariat's expenses was sent to Pope Francis in January 2015, less than a year after he established a new department to manage the Vatican's economic activities. The list included "crazy expenses that reached more than half a million euros after just six months of operations", according to Fittipaldi. The other book, Merchants in the Temple by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, paints a picture of financial mismanagement, greed, secrecy and waste in the Vatican's bureaucracy. The papacy of Francis's predecessor, Benedict XVI, was hit by the first so-called Vatileaks scandal over the leaking of embarrassing confidential Church papers. Benedict's butler was convicted over the leaks but was subsequently released from a Vatican cell thanks to a papal pardon.
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