No further suspects are being probed over the alleged leaking of confidential documents to Italian journalists by two former members of Pope Francis' reform commission, the Vatican said on Wednesday.
"There are no other suspects under investigation," Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi.
"Pope Francis is not worried. He knows what he has to do," Lombardi continued.
"These two [forthcoming] books certainly won't influence his decisions," Lombardi added, referring to two books due to be published by Italian journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi with new evidence of scandals at the Vatican.
Nuzzi's explosive Merchants in the Temple, due to hit bookstores on Thursday, alleges the Vatican is a "black hole" of mismanagement and greed where millions of euros are lost and donations for the poor end up funding the lifestyles of greedy monsignors and defenders of the status quo who will stop at nothing to thwart Francis’ financial reform drive.
The book reportedly cites a recording of the Pope himself in a secret 2013 meeting warning: “A large part of our costs is out of control.”
“We won’t pay”, Francis adds, referring to contracts signed without the slightest tender or quote.
Fittipaldi's book Avarice, also out this week, cites independent auditors who found that a foundation supporting a pediatric hospital in Rome paid 200,000 euros towards renovating the vast apartment of Tarciso Bertone, the former Vatican secretary-of-state.
One of the two people arrested last weekend over the leaked documents, who has since been released after agreeing to cooperate with the Vatican's investigation, Francesca Chaouqui, once tweeted that Bertone was "corrupt".
Chaouqui categorically denies wrongdoing and claims she was unjustly implicated in the scandal by her co-accused, Spanish priest Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, who remains in custody at the Vatican.
On Monday, the Vatican described the revelations as the "fruit of a grave betrayal of the trust given by the pope, and, as far as the authors [Nuzzi and Fittipaldi] go, of an operation to take advantage of a gravely illicit act of handing over confidential documentation."
The arrests and books mark a new phase in the so-called 'Vatileaks' scandal. It began in 2012 when Pope Benedict XVI's butler was convicted on charges he supplied Nuzzi with stolen documents for his earlier Vatican expose, the best-selling His Holiness.
The stolen private letters between Benedict and his private secretary disclosed venomous infighting at the top of the Catholic Church and serious graft allegations in the Vatican government.
