The Vatican’s former auditor
general, who resigned without explanation in June, said he was forced out
after his investigations into possible illegal activity hit too close to
home.
“Let me be clear: I did not
voluntarily resign. I was threatened with arrest,” Libero Milone said in an
interview conducted with four media outlets including Italy’s Corriere della
Sera daily.
The auditing whizz, who spent much
of his career with the audit firm Deloitte & Touche and was hired to much
fanfare in 2015, said high-ranking figures in the Vatican wanted to scupper
Pope Francis’s financial reform efforts. “I fear very sorry for the pope. I had
a splendid, indescribable relationship with him, but over the last 18 months
they stopped me seeing him. Obviously they didn’t want me telling him about
some of the things I’d seen,” he said. While a non-disclosure agreement
prevents him from giving details of the irregularities he uncovered, Milone
suggested his troubles began when he hired an outside firm to check whether the
computers of his team had been bugged. When he was hired Vatican officials said
he would be “completely independent” and would have the power to look through
the books of every department in the tiny city state, reporting only to the
pope. But he was accused of using the outside firm to spy on Vatican officials,
Milone said. “They accused me of having improperly looked for information on
Vatican members. I found out they had been investigating me for seven months,”
he added. “I was only doing my job”.