One of Italy's most prominent Catholic cardinals and a former minister have been put under investigation as part of a corruption scandal that has tainted the government and spread to touch the Vatican. Magistrates have told Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe and Pietro Lunardi, former infrastructure and transport minister in the centre-right government, that they were being investigated for aggravated corruption.
The magistrates in the central city of Perugia are investigating a web of corruption and favours involving public works contracts, mostly in construction for major events, such as last year's G8 summit and the millennium celebrations.
Cardinal Sepe, 67, is being investigated for alleged corruption when he was a Vatican official running the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, a cash-and-real-estate-rich department of the Vatican that finances the work of missions abroad. The cardinal, who ran the department until he was moved to Naples in 2006, is suspected of aggravated corruption with Mr Lunardi in connection with a real estate deal.
According to Italian newspapers La Stampa, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, Mr Lunardi bought a building in Rome from Cardinal Sepe's department in 2004 at a price well below market value.
The next year, when Mr Lunardi was minister, he approved a decree allocating funds for the restoration of historic church buildings, including the 16th century headquarters of the mission department facing Rome's Spanish Steps.
In a statement, the Vatican said it hoped the situation "could be cleared up fully and rapidly in order to eliminate any shadows, be they on the person (Sepe) or Church institutions".
It said Cardinal Sepe would cooperate with magistrates but proper procedures had to be used as the Vatican is a sovereign state.
The Vatican appears to be taking a tack of transparency to avoid a repetition of a showdown with Italy in 1982, when it refused to cooperate with magistrates investigating the Vatican Bank's role in the fraudulent bankruptcy of the Banco Ambrosiano.
Cardinal Sepe, mobbed by reporters as he was leaving a church in Naples on Sunday, said: "The truth will emerge ... I am serene."
In an interview with Corriere della Sera, Mr Lunardi said he would see magistrates in Perugia soon "to clear everything up".
