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| - An Italian financier who acted as Vatican intermediary in an opaque London property deal and was arrested earlier this month on corruption charges has been released on bail, the Holy See said Monday. The investigating magistrates had taken on board the arguments presented by the defence, as well as numerous documents they had submitted, the Vatican said in a statement. Accordingly, they had decided to release Gianluigi Torzi on a provisional basis, the statement added. Torzi played a key role in the final stages of the 2018 sale of a luxury apartment building on London's Sloane Avenue to the Secretariat of State, the body charged with the Vatican's diplomatic and political functions. After his arrest on June 5, he was charged with extortion, embezzlement, aggravated fraud and money laundering, which carry prison terms of to 12 years under Vatican law. Last October, Vatican police carried out a raid on Secretariat of State offices, and five Vatican officials were suspended. In an account published on the Vatican website just after his arrest, Torzi was alleged to have fraudulently acquired voting rights in a company that controlled the appartment block. He then allegedly demanded large sums of money from the Vatican to cede these voting rights, worth some 15 million euros in early 2019. cm-ljm/bmm/jj
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