Raffaele Mincione should be a happy man. He has made two serious fortunes in the world of high-risk investment finance, is comfortable with his wealth, effortlessly handsome and blessed with a beautiful wife and two daughters he adores. The Rome-born financier divides his time between Italy, Switzerland, Greece and the United States, but home is London and a sumptuously renovated Knightsbridge house (a townhouse and two mews houses knocked into one), which is elegantly and expensively furnished.
Mincione agrees when I suggest that, having just turned 60, he should be enjoying this good life he has built.
“I thought that by now I would be doing something different, something good for others,” he says. “Instead, I’m completely bitter about so much about my life that I have difficulty in understanding it.”
The first sign that all is not well comes when I am greeted on the doorstep of Mincione’s home by Gerry, whose neat haircut and tight-fitting shirt over a stocky build immediately suggest he is ex-military.
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My hunch is correct. Gerry is part of the private security team that protects the Mincione family around the clock. He shows me into a sterile zone between the heavy front doors and secure inner doors where visitors can be discreetly assessed.
Mincione’s caution lies in the fact that he has become public enemy No 1 in the eyes of the Vatican, and he is increasingly fearful of what that might mean.
Just over a decade ago he was asked to help the Catholic church invest a large amount of money. The funds ended up in a part share of a landmark London office building. Then the Vatican bought him out, lost money and accused Mincione of embezzlement.
The financier has since been cast as the merchant in the temple, the wily money man who defrauded the church of millions. For the past five years he has been engaged in a tortuous, never-ending legal battle with the Holy See that has led to him being convicted by a special Vatican tribunal (where the judges and prosecutors were appointed by the “victim” of the crime, the late Pope Francis) and sentenced to five and a half years in jail with a €200 million confiscation order.
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Tellingly, in the UK, where the deal was done, there have been no police or financial authority investigations into what was a complex but not atypical London property transaction.
Mincione is free pending an appeal (again to a Vatican court). But he is wary, fearful. He mentions the death of Roberto Calvi, the Italian banker who was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in June 1982 in another Vatican scandal.
“We live with security all day long because, well, I never thought about it before but people talk in Italy about the London scandal and the Blackfriars Bridge affair. They start to make all these connections. My wife kept telling me I should take security for myself because the more we fight, the more these people are becoming aggressive.
“There are 1.4 billion Catholics in the world. I don’t believe that there is a big complotto …” He pauses, searching for the English word, looking to his wife for a translation.
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“Conspiracy,” says Maddalena, a luxury handbag designer. “Conspiracy,” he repeats. “I don’t think there is a conspiracy. I’m not that guy that believes in conspiracies. But, all of a sudden, from being a normal person, I now find myself being judged.”
What he fears is the remote chance that he might meet a fanatic, someone who thinks he has robbed the church. We speak twice, once at his home and once over Zoom when he is in New York, and each time Mincione mentions there are only two theocratic states in the world — the Vatican and Iran.
Does he worry that he will be attacked by a religious extremist, as happened to Salman Rushdie? The author was violently assaulted more than 30 years after he was placed under a death sentence by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.
“It could be when I go and buy a sandwich. It could be anywhere,” he says.
An ‘extremely risky’ deal
A short walk from Mincione’s home leads to the building that has been the cause of all his trouble. Approached from a side street, the pink terracotta façade of 60 Sloane Avenue suddenly looms. Designed by the architect who built Harrods, it was originally the department store’s car showroom and repair workshop.
Today that ornate exterior cloaks a steel and glass office complex, which looks largely and rather sadly vacant. Ground-floor frontages advertise retail space for rent. A first-floor window is dotted with Post-it notes, the remnants of a brainstorming session.
Mincione’s dream had been to develop this distinctive building into luxury apartments and his investment group had acquired planning permission to do that.
Then in 2013 he was approached by the Vatican, which sought his assistance with a proposal to invest a large sum of money to drill for oil in Angola.
“We spent one year trying to analyse the feasibility of the scheme. Could it be economically viable?” he says.
“It turned out to be extremely risky. We killed the deal. We had their $200 million in our accounts. And we said, OK, we will return the money.
“Then we were told, ‘You’ve been so scrupulous. You’ve been very efficient. Why don’t you invest the money in something else?’ I said, ‘I’m invested already in a building in London. I don’t think you need to go to Angola to double your money if you want to make an investment. And the UK is a much safer place.’ That’s how we started the investment in the London building.”
The Holy See lodged its money in a hedge fund created by Mincione’s firm. It bought a 45 per cent share with the ownership of the building cloaked by layers of overseas trusts and investment funds. The potential returns were significant, with the apartments, once developed, earmarked for sale at about £27 million each.
But the London investment and the Vatican’s financial activities were out of sync with the views of Pope Francis, who arrived in office in 2013 preaching a vision of “a poor church for the poor”.
The man behind the Vatican’s investment strategy was Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who held the position of Substitute, effectively the Pope’s chief of staff. It was Becciu who floated the Angola oil idea, approved the Sloane Avenue scheme and had direct dealings with Mincione.
As Francis pursued an agenda of reform and transparency, Becciu came under investigation. (A fortnight ago he withdrew from the papal conclave after reportedly being shown a request signed by Pope Francis before he died. Becciu said, “I have decided to obey the will of Pope Francis and not enter the conclave despite remaining convinced of my innocence.”)
‘They kicked me out from a project that I really loved’
In October 2018, Becciu was moved aside from his senior role and a month later the Vatican decided it wanted to end its association with Mincione and become sole owner of 60 Sloane Avenue.
Mincione says he advised strongly against the move, citing the downturn in London property prices because of Brexit. “I said things are going to go back to normal. There’s a shock in the system in England. There was not a single real estate transaction being done until people knew what to do with Brexit. I said, ‘We wait,’ but they didn’t want to wait.”
Mincione says he received pleading text messages from a senior cleric. “He kept telling me, ‘Oh, you have to sell. Be a good Catholic, sell it to us.’ I was thinking, I don’t want to get in trouble with the church.
“I felt like I was being kicked out. I was resentful. They kicked me out from a project that I really loved. I asked for the money, whatever was owed to me to leave. And that was it.”
Mincione played hardball over the transfer of the property. He concedes his valuations of the building’s worth were “ambitious” but insists he was selling “a project not a property”. He accuses the Vatican of negligence by letting the planning permission lapse, causing the value of the building to drop sharply.
Having lost confidence in Mincione, the Vatican used a middleman, Gianluigi Torzi, to oversee the property transfer. Mincione’s share was moved to a holding company controlled by Torzi, who was granted a meeting with the Pope and then demanded an extra €15 million to complete the procedure. A London high court judge later described Torzi’s conduct as “unscrupulous and dishonest”.
In total, the Vatican is estimated to have sunk about £300 million into the building before selling it in 2022 to an American investment firm for £186 million.
A target for the Vatican
If Mincione thought his dealings with the Holy See were over, he was wrong. He was now a target of the Vatican’s new-found zeal for investigating what it considered unethical financial dealings.
Initially he came under the spotlight because of his dealings with Becciu, whose conduct was under intense scrutiny. In 2019, Vatican police raided the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority, seizing documents, phones and computers. Then, on a visit to Rome, Mincione had his phone and tablet confiscated by Italian police. After visiting the Vatican to sign some legal papers, his Italian lawyer was tailed through the city streets. Mincione believes they hoped to find him to serve an arrest warrant.
With the investigation widening, Pope Francis used his extraordinary powers as an absolute monarch to issue decrees, known as rescritti, authorising phone tapping, email interception and arrests.
The eventual destination was a court case, labelled the Vatican’s “trial of the century”, conducted over several months in 2022 and 2023. The prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi, was known for having previously defended mafia bosses. The judges were appointed by and had sworn obedience to the Pope.
The star witness was Becciu’s deputy, Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, who had been under suspicion but became a co-operating witness. After the trial he was appointed a senior prosecutor in the Vatican’s canonical court. Two weeks ago leaked papers showed the Pope wrote to Perlasca before he changed his evidence, while an audio recording implicated a senior Vatican official in advising the cleric on how to alter his testimony. The Vatican declined to comment.
Becciu, once thought of as a future Pope, was the main defendant but many of his acolytes and associates were swept up in the net. He was accused of making a €125,000 payment to a charity run by his brother. Mincione found himself on trial with nine other defendants, including Cecilia Marogna, a self-styled intelligence expert accused of spending money intended as a ransom for a kidnapped nun on designer goods and furniture, and a man accused of investing church money in Hollywood films.
The initial charges against the financier inflamed Catholic opinion around the world. He was effectively accused of stealing from collection plates by using money from Peter’s Pence, the church’s global collection to help poor populations, in the Sloane Avenue scheme. Late in the trial the allegation was dropped and it was disclosed most of the money for the building had been lent to the Holy See by its long-term banker, Credit Suisse. No representatives of the Swiss bank faced any charges or appeared as witnesses.
Mincione was instead accused of embezzlement in the deal to transfer the property to the Vatican in 2018. Eventually he was convicted of the basic fact of accepting the Holy See’s money for investment in 2013/14 — an offence that fell not under criminal law but under Canon 1284 of the Code of Canon Law, the church’s own rulebook for clergy and church officials.
Vatican News reported that his conviction was because the “investment in a high-risk fund was a gamble contrary to the prudence required by the [Vatican’s] rules”.
Mincione was sentenced to prison for an offence of which he had never been aware. He is yet to serve a night in jail (the Vatican doesn’t even have a prison, just three cramped pre-trial cells) because he has lodged an appeal against conviction.
Becciu received the same sentence and is also appealing.
Angry and with a growing sense of injustice, Mincione has kept battling. He obtained a legal opinion from the international law expert Rodney Dixon KC, who expressed “grave concern” about the conduct of the investigation and said the trial was “marred by substantial violations of well-established international legal obligations applicable to all criminal proceedings. The evidence I’ve seen shows Mr Mincione’s rights have been violated in a manner that severely undermined his ability to defend himself.”
Mincione filed a complaint against the Vatican’s running of the trial at the United Nations and took his grievance to London’s commercial court.
‘I lived my Gordon Gekko moment’
Thoroughly Italian in his style, accent and manners, Mincione loves England and placed his trust in the English legal system. He first came to London aged 18 to study history and the history of economics at university. Inspired by the film All the President’s Men, he had aspired to become a journalist until, shortly after graduation, he found himself being pursued by a recruitment agent.
“The guy kept calling me and saying, ‘You would be perfect for Goldman Sachs.’ ”
Mincione had never heard of the finance giant and had no desire to work in banking, which he imagined involved sitting behind a counter.
“Then I went in for a set of interviews, just because of the money. And then I said, ‘OK, interesting.’ There were all these kids trading — very, very young people — and it looked fun. That was 1987. I sold my soul to banking. It was actually a very plain mathematical decision.”
He lived the “Gordon Gekko moment” in London and New York. “I really thought that I was lucky that, by mistake, I found a place where I was good.”
He worked for Goldman, Merrill Lynch and the Japanese bank Nomura. There were postings in London, New York, Tokyo and Moscow during the Wild West Yeltsin years. He became an expert in derivatives and debt refinancing and in 1999 made his first fortune when he gambled on Gazprom, the Russian energy giant.
“I was in St Petersburg, in the Gazprom office, and I heard it said that, ‘If we touch that switch, there will be no one in Munich frying an egg.’ I invested all my money there and made 20 times what I invested.”
Now rich, he ducked out of banking (“I don’t like bankers”) and for a while did nothing (“I loved it”) before setting up his own investment fund. As the financial crash of 2008 hit, he was well placed with his expertise in refinancing — basically repackaging bad debts — to make a second fortune. Since then he has been an investor and a dealmaker, making money and being prepared to lose money.
With such a career path he was the ideal candidate to be the villain of the piece in the Vatican’s stated pursuit of becoming a poorer church.
“I think the initial target was Cardinal Becciu and I was collateral damage,” Mincione says as he looks back on the legal battle. “But now I’m the guy who’s resisting the most — I’m not complying. And I’m becoming the main target because I’m creating too much friction.”
Last year, bruised from the Vatican trial, Mincione applied for 31 judicial declarations in London about the way he conducted his business dealings with the Vatican, including statements that he had behaved honestly.
In a ruling in February, Mr Justice Robin Knowles granted 29 of the 31 declarations and expressed surprise that the Vatican had become involved in schemes concerning oil drilling and luxury property. The judge commented it was remarkable that Pope Francis had been directly involved in complex financial decisions where the Vatican lacked the kind of experience and expertise necessary.
However, there were two declarations the judge declined to grant Mincione, whom he described as “flamboyant”. Those concerned a request the court declare the financier and his funds had acted in “good faith” in their dealings with the Holy See.
He said the Vatican “had reason to consider itself utterly let down in its experience with” Mincione and his associates. The financiers “made no attempt to protect the [Vatican] from fraudulent bad actors. They took no care towards the [Vatican] and they put their own interests first.”
It was those very quotable words from the judge, rather than Mincione’s resounding legal victory, that dominated news reports of the ruling (especially in Italy) and allowed the Vatican to claim a PR victory. Only last week, the judge ordered the Holy See to pay half of Mincione’s £7 million legal costs.
Mincione is rueful. “What a stupid thing for me to do, dealing on faith against the church. They know faith more than everybody else. What was I thinking, ‘good faith’? I’m happy that the court found I did everything legally and I’ve not done anything dishonestly. But faith is not a question for a ‘humble banker’, not when you are up against humble priests.
“One guy comes to court dressed in black with a cross and speaks about God. And the other one is a banker, who has already been given five and a half years of jail in the Vatican. The judge went against the church, the Vatican, on everything and then had to say, well, you know, at least on faith, I mean, let’s give territorial supremacy to the Vatican.”
‘I cannot let go. I need to keep fighting’
Sitting in his home, surrounded by lawyers and PR people, a bodyguard at the front door, Mincione finds himself wondering what this has all been about and if there is any point in continuing to fight.
“Between my legal expenses and the Vatican expenses, together we must have spent something close to £20 million in this court case,” he calculates.
In his mind there is a continuing tussle between this “What’s it all for?” argument and his anxiety about what it means for his place in the world, his standing in the minds of his friends and his family.
The man who has had so much success, who has played the markets and won, is worried about his legacy. He wants to be liked, to be well remembered.
The damage to his image first hit when the Peter’s Pence allegation was making headlines. His daughters’ school, Godolphin and Latymer in west London, refused to accept a donation from the Mincione family to its bursary fund because of the “potential reputational risk”.
“I said, you should be teaching my daughter, and everyone else, that everybody is innocent until proven guilty. You should be accepting my money. ‘No, no, no. We won’t.’
“I realised that if little things like us donating money are already being looked at in a way that suggests I’m guilty and are having an impact on my daughters’ environment — because at school everybody was talking about it — I felt I cannot let go. I need to keep fighting.”
But fighting comes with a cost. “The thing that upsets me the most is the waste of time, which you cannot bring back. You cannot buy it back. You cannot do anything about it. It’s gone.
“There have been friends who have died and I could not be close to them because I was so worried about me, me, me. My daughter grew up and left home and I was not part of many events when I was supposed to be there, again because I was caught up in this case. There’s so much I’ve been deprived of. I feel like I’ve already spent five years in jail in the process of defending myself.
“I don’t think I’m particularly sensitive, but this has taken me away from so much family stuff that is really important.
“Even my job now is affected. I thought, OK, I can always do my work, but I spend so much time with lawyers thinking about defending myself from something that I still don’t understand.”
After Pope Francis’s death, Mincione says his hope is that a new papacy will mean a fresh look at the Vatican’s “trial of the century”.
“Perhaps they will ask just how could a British financier be ‘convicted’ of a breach of canon law? I think it is in everyone’s interests, including the church’s, to draw a line under this matter.”