After two years of investigations involving powerful cardinals, and perhaps most prominent officials, Angelo Piccio, who was the number two person in the Secretariat of State, the Vatican is witnessing the launch of the first trial of a major financial scandal involving a lost real estate investment deal purchased with charitable funds.

In the context, Vatican prosecutors said that 10 accused, including prominent figures in London's financial world and church officials, had been involved in various crimes such as embezzlement, fraud and corruption. It was not clear, however, whether former Cardinal Angelo Piccio, who was the Pope's closest assistant, would appear before the court at the Vatican Museums on the day of the opening of the hearings.

But Piccio, 73, insists that he is innocent and a victim of conspiracy, the most prominent suspect in the case involving the Church's purchase of 17,000 square metres of property in London, in the high-end Chelsea area when the Cardinal was the number two person in the State Secretariat.

Piccio is also being prosecuted in a case involving charges of embezzlement, abuse of influence and pressure on witnesses, as well as separate charges of paying hundreds of thousands of euros of church money to a charity run by his brother.

The trial involves the former assistant of Pope Francis, who was expelled by the Great Ink in September, and stripped him of his powers as a cardinal.

The plaintiffs wrote that the main defendants were "actors in a rotten and profitable corrupt regime, sometimes made possible by limited, but very clear, internal collusion."

Since his election as President of the Catholic Church in 2013, the Pope has pledged to regulate the finances of the Vatican, plunged into decades of scandals. After a Vatican police operation in 2019 targeting Secretariat offices, the Pope stripped the Secretariat of its oversight functions and handed over responsibility to others.

The scandal is particularly embarrassing because the funds used in risky operations, including the investment of 350 million euros ($415 million) for the purchase of the property in Chelsea, came from the Peters Pence Fund (Boutros Handouts), in which financial contributions to the Pope are collected.

In this context, the plaintiffs added that officials at the top of the Vatican pyramid, including the President of Piccio and the ally of Pope Cardinal Pietro Parolin, were in favour of the London estate project but were unaware of the financial details.