René Brülhart, the former financial supervisor of the Vatican, on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. (August 30, 2018)
Image:
Keystone/Jean-Christophe Bott
The Vatican’s former top financial overseer René Brülhart is due to stand trial at Zurich District Court today (Wednesday). The case also concerns the sale of secret information to private clients.
The public prosecutor’s office accuses the 52-year-old Swiss national of having bribed Austrian officials, among other things. The allegations date back to the years 2013 to 2016. The accused is said to have obtained information from an Austrian secret service agent and a former finance minister via an intermediary. Russian and German officials were also consulted.
The woman who is said to have procured the information for the Swiss man has herself already been convicted of bribery. According to media reports, she is a former GDR agent who worked as a private investigator and Brülhart is also said to have carried out assignments for her.
Brülhart made the inquiries via companies of which he was the sole director or for which his wife worked. In each case, it was about information about competitors or opponents of his clients. The indictment includes inquiries about the controversial investors Viktor Vekselberg and Ronny Pecik or the Russian oligarch Dmitri Mazepin.
Five years in prison demanded
The accused is also charged with multiple counts of incitement to breach official secrecy and violation of banking secrecy. According to the indictment, in his function as the Vatican’s top financial supervisor, he insisted on being able to view information about a UBS account.
The public prosecutor’s office is demanding a prison sentence of five years. Brülhart’s defense lawyer denied all the accusations in an interview with the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper. The presumption of innocence applies until a final conviction is handed down.