Neustar AUSTRAC GoDaddy DotCatholic
April 7 was supposed to be the day of the interrogation of the most illustrious defendant in the trial on the London palace, but everything has been postponed to May 5 due to an impediment by the defense lawyers. He is obviously Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who ended up in disgrace on the evening of September 24, 2020, when he renounced the rights of the cardinalate at the end of a twenty-minute interview during which Pope Francis informed him that he no longer trusted him. At the origin of the Pontiff’s decision, the reporting by the Vatican judiciary on the alleged embezzlement crimes that the cardinal would have committed and for which, subsequently, he was sent for trial. At that stage, prior to the request for summons to court launched in the summer of 2021 by the Office of the Promoter of Justice,
Among them was also filtered an alleged Australian track linked to one of the most serious cases of injustice in recent history: at the beginning of October 2020, in fact, the Corriere della Serawrote of “700 thousand euros sent to Australia through some fractional transfers” that “they may have been used to ‘buy’ the accusers in the pedophile trial against Cardinal George Pell”. Reading the articles that reported them at the time, those accusations seemed heavy and rather detailed. Then, however, despite the spotlight on the Vatican trial, the Australian trail was hardly mentioned any more.
In between was the incredible mistake of the Australian Anti-Money Laundering Authority (Austrac)which, responding to a question by Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells formulated precisely in the wake of the reconstructions reported by the Italian newspapers, had indicated 2.3 billion dollars and more than 400 thousand transactions the round of money between the Vatican and Australia in the last six years taken into consideration. Although the figure seemed unrealistic to anyone, there had been some commentators who had considered it the smoking gun to support the idea of Becciu’s hand behind the alleged plot against Pell.
A thesis dismantled a few days later by the clarification of Austrac that he had had to admit the calculation error, clarifying that the total movements amounted to just 9.5 million dollars for 362 transfers.
The only one to return to the subject had been Cardinal Pellwith cryptic statements: “We know that some money went from the Vatican to Australia, two million and 230 thousand dollars, but so far no one has explained why”, said the prefect emeritus of the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy. What we do know is that between 2016 and 2017 the Secretariat of State – of which Becciu was the substitute at the time – authorized the payment of multiple wire transfers worth more than two million dollars to the Melbourne-based company Neustar. . With regard to those movements on which the suspicion that there could be a connection with the indictment of Pell was foreshadowed, it was the Holy See Press Office itself that clarified in a statement dated 13 January 2021 that “the figure is attributable to some contractual obligations and
This is confirmed by documents that La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana was able to view: Neustar is none other than an IT security company – born as AusRegistry International Pty in 2003 until its name change in 2016 – which has been called GoDaddy since August 2020. The company is in charge of registering and implementing top-level domains (TLDs) and claims to be a trusted advisor to a number of government agencies. Indeed, from the documents we have seen, in a letter of March 2012, the then Secretary General of the Australian Bishops’ Conference, Monsignor Brian Joseph Lucas had written to Monsignor Paul Tighe, at the time secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, to express on behalf of the Australian bishops “support for the request of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications to acquire the generic top level domain”.
When ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers)has ‘liberalized’ the granting of TLDs, the Vatican has moved to register and control exclusively the “.catholic” domain in English, Arabic, Russian and also in Chinese. The request was accepted in 2013 and the domain was registered by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. The same office, therefore, to which the letter from Monsignor Lucas was addressed with which the Australian Bishops Conference gave its green light and in which it was stated that this project (the creation of a “dot-catholic” domain in Chinese) would facilitate “notably the work of the Conference in authenticating the presence of the Catholic community in the digital space” confirming that the bishops would have been happy to ”