The five-and-a-half-year sentence of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, accused of fraud and embezzlement, has been overturned in the first instance. The trial must be retried.
The Vatican Court of Appeal's decision, which declared the proceedings "relatively null" and ordered a "renewal of the hearing," is a real dramatic turn of events.
The judges ordered that all documents and records from the preliminary investigation be filed with the court registry, setting June 22 as the date for the parties to appear to establish the hearing schedule.
The Court specifies in the order that "it does not declare the overall nullity of the entire first-instance proceedings, the trial, or the sentence," which "maintain their effects." But the effect of the decision, in essence, is this: everything must be redone .
The defense of the cardinal and the other convicted persons in the trial for the management of the funds of the Secretariat of State had requested in appeal that the judgment be declared null and void because "the Promoter of Justice (the Vatican Prosecutor, ed.) had made an incomplete deposit of the findings of the preliminary investigation; some documents had then been reproduced with redactions and not in their full version."
The defense also contested that Pope Francis' Rescripta, with which he had modified the rules by derogating from the procedural code, had not been "published in a timely manner."
The Court of Appeal's order notes that this is an unprecedented situation because "the Vatican judges' rulings do not contain any precedents that refer to the partial filing of the preliminary investigation file or the filing of documents partially redacted." However , the "principle of full knowledge of all documents collected during the preliminary investigation by the accused and his defense counsel" is clearly not respected . Hence the decision of "relative nullity," because "a fundamental act of the trial, namely the summons," has been vitiated and now "has the effect that the Court of Appeal must uphold the judgment and order a new hearing before it."
