(supersedes previous)(ANSA) - Vatican City, November 24 -
The so-called Vatileaks 2 trial against five people for
allegedly leaking confidential Holy See documents kicked off in
a Vatican court on Tuesday.
Investigative journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano
Fittipaldi are on trial for allegedly using the leaked material
in books documenting Vatican waste and mismanagement and lavish
spending by clergymen.
Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, his former assistant
Nicola Maio and PR expert Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui are
charged with leaking the material.
Proceedings began with the court rejecting a defence motion
to dismiss the case against Fittipaldi.
Fittipaldi told the court he can't defend himself because
the indictment "doesn't contain the least description of the
charges against me - not even an implicit one". The court failed
to say what leaked documents he is supposed to have used in his
recently published book, Avarice.
Also on Tuesday, Nuzzi told trial reporters that freedom of
information and of the press are worth defending.
"We are not martyrs, we're just reporters but some
principles must be defended," said the author of Merchants in
the Temple. "You can criticize, appreciate, or blame but there
is another level, which is safeguarding freedom of information".
Fittipaldi's book Avarice alleges 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 spending
included "crazy expenses that reached more than half a million
euros after just six months of operations".
Nuzzi's Merchants in the Temple paints a picture of
financial mismanagement, greed, secrecy and waste in the
Vatican's bureaucracy.
Both books quickly sold out in Rome bookshops when they
were released on November 5, and also became Amazon and Kindle
best-sellers.
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