Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, the Substitue of the Secretariat of State, will appear at the British High Court in London on July 4–8 to testify in a trial regarding the Vatican’s purchase and sale of the property on Sloane Avenue in Chelsea.
The Secretariat of State, however, has always contested the inflated price of the property and the special powers Mincione acquired in the various transactions beyond the contracts. All subsequent operations, such as the expensive Credit Lombard and the purchase of a share through the Athena Capital Fund headed by Mincione himself, were aimed"to satisfy the interests of the managers rather than the subscriber, burdened with significant losses," Severino highlighted.
Meanwhile, the attorneys for the Secretariat of State—Charles Hollander, Samar Abbas Kazmi, James Bradford, and Jagoda Klimowicz—have prepared an 84-page defense memorandum. The memorandum also emphasizes that the trial in the Vatican Tribunal had the"advantage" of being based on a broad adversarial process with an"enormous number" of people heard from"all interested parties ," reaching"conclusions that spanned a long period."