VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Ferrucio Panicco, former deputy auditor general for the Holy See, who was part of a ten-million-dollar lawsuit against the Vatican for unlawful dismissal and damages from withholding his medical records, died of cancer on Wednesday, June 21, at the age of 63.
Ferruccio Panicco was suing the #Vatican for 10 million, along with former Auditor General Libero Milone.
He has now died of cancer while his suit proceeds. Report via @EdwardPentin https://t.co/Fi2t3kqTjY pic.twitter.com/ONyD0tta1o— Michael Haynes 🇻🇦 (@MLJHaynes) June 22, 2023
Last November, Panicco, an ex-chief auditor for the Italian manufacturer Indesit, had jointly filed the lawsuit against the Vatican together with Libero Milone, the auditor general for the Holy See and a former chairman and CEO of Deloitte Italy, under whom Panicco had worked at the Vatican from 2015 to 2017, by appointment of Pope Francis.
The pair filed a 53-page lawsuit on November 4 of last year against the Secretariat of State for the amount of $9.25 million, to “obtain proper reparations from suffered damages” consequent upon their unjust dismissal in 2017.
The suit argues that they were unjustly accused of spying and embezzlement in June of 2017 by Cardinal Angelo Becciu – at the time second in charge of the Secretariat of State – accusations which, they argue, stemmed from their audit which uncovered widespread corruption within the hierarchy of the Holy See.
Libero Milone has continuously insisted that Becciu’s accusations against him and Panicco are absolutely false, and that they were the result of his audit uncovering uncomfortable financial corruption like the infamous London apartment deal, which cost the Vatican hundreds of millions of euros, investments in pharmaceutical companies that produced abortifacients and contraceptives, contrary to the Church’s moral doctrine, embezzlement by high-ranking cardinals and officials, and money laundering conducted by the Secretariat of State and the Vatican Bank.
Additionally, Panicco argued that the Vatican had caused serious damage to his health by withholding personal medical records from procedures he had undergone at a medical facility within Vatican City. The “extensive diagnostic testing” for cancer that he had undertaken, Panicco ultimately had to repeat in his hometown of Turin because the records, which were illegally seized from his office shortly before his dismissal, were never returned.
Multiple requests to the Vatican and Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin to return the documents went unheeded. Due to the withholding of his medical records, Panicco’s diagnosis was delayed, which he said put in jeopardy the curability of what turned out to be prostate cancer, from which he died last week.
Last November, when Panicco filed the lawsuit against the Vatican, he told journalists that he thought members of the Vatican were “guilty, not maliciously, of condemning me to death for no reason after slow and significant suffering. They took away 10 to 15 years of my life.”
The Vatican Court has sat on the lawsuit since it was filed, even refusing to accept Panicco and Milone’s lawyer of choice. The two men have criticized the delay, with Milone stating he may expose the evidence of the corruption he uncovered during his audit, should the Vatican refuse to hear the case.
Speaking of the lawsuit and the death of his colleague, Milone told the National Catholic Register, “For me, this is a traumatic issue because it could have been resolved a long time ago. I’ve lost a friend and a colleague and a true professional whom I’d worked with for over 10 years.”