Vatileaks defence petitions rejected

(ANSA) - Vatican City, November 24 - Defence petitions were rejected Tuesday as the 'Vatileaks 2' trial against five people in the leaking of documents on alleged financial mismanagement and clerical overspending kicked off in a Vatican court.
    One of the two journalists on trial for publishing expose' books using leaked information, Gianlugi Nuzzi, told reporters that the pair were "not martyrs, just reporters".
    Investigative journalists Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi are on trial for allegedly using the leaked material while Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, his former assistant Nicola Maio and PR expert Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui are charged with leaking the material.
    Vallejo Balda and Chaouqui were both members of the now-defunct COSEA commission set up to advise Pope Francis on reform of the Holy See's economic-administrative structure.
    After Tuesday's short procedural session hearings will take place every day from Monday on, the court said. One of the exhibits to be presented is a long account by Vallejo Balda of his relations with Chaouqui, ANSA has learned. 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.
    Meanwhile 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.
    The case is called Vatileaks 2 because the first Vatileaks case, involving Francis's predecessor Benedict XVI, resulted in Benedict's then butler being convicted.
    Benedict's papacy was hit by the original VatiLeaks scandal and some observers said it hastened his shock decision to abdicate in 2013.
    The butler, Paolo Gabriele, was convicted over the leaks but was subsequently released from a Vatican cell thanks to a papal pardon. The Vatican has said that the revelations in Fittipaldi's and Nuzzi's books are not all that sensational because the pope's reforms have rendered them out of date.
    The Vatican has come under fire from organisations including Reporters Without Borders and the OSCE for putting journalists on trial, with critics saying the case poses a threat to freedom of the press.