First Vatileaks 2 trial hearing kicks off

(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.