Pope Francis has blunted the powers of the Vatican
department involved in a controversial London property deal and ordered all
ties cut with a suspect investment fund, his spokesman said on Thursday.

Francis has ordered that the funds of the Secretariat of State,
the nerve centre of the bureaucracy of the 1.3 billion-member Church, be
controlled by another department, allowing three months for the changes to take
place.

The pontiff created a commission Wednesday to oversee the
changes, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said, following a vast financial
scandal which has already cost one high-ranking Catholic cardinal his post. The
order was made in a letter to the Secretariat in August which was published in
a rare move on Thursday.

 Influential Italian
cardinal Angelo Becciu, pushed out by the pope in September, was number two in
the Secretariat of State, and linked to the purchase of a luxury building in
London, which is now subject to an investigation.

Becciu stands accused of giving financier Enrico Crasso, a
former Credit Suisse manager, control over millions of euros of Vatican
investment funds, including from Peter’s Pence — collection money destined for
the poor. Crasso also manages an investment fund — Centurion Global Fund —
with links to Swiss banks that are being investigated for money laundering
scandals, according to Italy’s investigative weekly L’Espresso.

The Vatican invested millions of euros into that fund, which
lost money, while Crasso and others made millions in fees, the weekly has
alleged

.Becciu has denied all wrongdoing.

Management of the Secretariat of State’s funds will be
handed to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), the
office that manages real estate holdings in Rome and elsewhere in Italy.

“Particular attention should be paid to the investments
made in London and the Centurion fund, from which it is necessary to exit as
soon as possible,” Francis said in his letter to the Secretariat. If that
was not possible, the Vatican should at at least deal with them “in such a
way as to eliminate all reputational risks”, he insisted.