Italian financial police on Tuesday arrested a woman in Milan who was paid half a million euros (90,590,000) in a Slovenian bank account by the Vatican, local media reported.
Celia Marogna was arrested at a friend’s home in the northern city on an Interpol warrant at the request of the Holy See, according to the website of the daily Il Courier della Sera.
The 39-year-old woman has been called “Cardinal Woman” or “500,000-euro woman” by reporters. And the revelations about the payment to Marogna are all spice for his alleged relationship with the spying and shadowy Vatican Power Games stories.
The payments to Marogna come from Cardinal Angelo Bequiu, whose funds were abruptly removed from his role by Pope Francis last month.
Her face was hidden behind large sunglasses in front of reporters in early October, Marogna said, adding that her services as a mediator in the money were the release of abducted priests and nuns in Africa and Asia.
In several interviews, he confirmed that રકમ 500,000 had been paid to his Lublaja-based company Logic.
Like Becky, 72, Marogna is a native of Sardinia.
The cardinal gave him the power to pay while managing the church’s huge donations while serving as the second in the state of the Vatican Secretariat.
“I did not steal a single euro,” Cecilia Marogna told the newspaper Domani about a payment of tens of thousands of euros to the branch.
Rather, “I have a letter from the chief giving me the right to travel and run diplomatic relations to help the church in difficult states,” he said, “claiming to know senior members of the Italian secret services.”
He told Cree Rear della Serra that he was “not Becky’s mistress”, calling himself a “political analyst and intelligence expert” with a “network of relations in Africa and the Middle East”, protecting Vatican representatives abroad.
Several Italian media outlets received an anonymous envelope with details from Marogna’s company accounts.
Investigators broadcast the TV program Le I, spending 200,000 euros on some of the luxury products, including 12,000 euros for armchairs.
“I think after all this work I have the right to buy myself an armchair!” Marogna said he is an innocent victim of internal Vatican power struggles.
glr / tgb / spm
