New York - Movie star Anne Hathaway's former boyfriend, Raffaello Follieri, was sentenced to four and a half years in jail Thursday after pleading guilty to fraud charges.

Raffaello Follieri, 30, is an Italian businessman who posed as the Vatican’s representative to the United States in order to get investors to think he could buy, using his high-placed connections, Catholic properties at big discounts. Instead, he was actually sending the money they gave him to foreign personal bank accounts.

Prosecutors said he used the money he bilked from investors to fund a lifestyle suitable for the boyfriend of one of Hollywood's biggest stars - travelling on private planes, enjoying expensive hotels and dinners and renting yachts. He also rented an exclusive Manhattan apartment for 37,000 dollars a month.

Shortly after his break-up with the leading actress in „The Devil Wears Prada,” he was arrested by the FBI and ordered by the U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl to give back $2.4 million in cash, along with jewelry and watches.

The prosecutors stated that his elaborate scam included keeping ceremonial robes in his Manhattan office, telling investors he had been in charge of the Vatican’s financial affairs and also claiming he had met the Pope in person.

Anne Hathaway's diaries have been confiscated by the FBI during a raid at her ex-boyfriend's Manhattan apartment on July 24, which the two shared until breaking up. Among other things that have been taken from his apartment there were pictures of him and Miss Hathaway as well as the Clintons, Pope John Paul II and the McCains.

In September, just before her ex-beau pleaded guilty to federal charges of wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy, Anne Hathaway finally opened up about his arrest and the hard times she’s been through since then, in an interview with W magazine.

The actress said she felt like “a rug was pulled out from under me” when her Italian ex-boyfriend was arrested, but luckily, her “friends threw another rug back under me.”

“As soon as I found out about the arrest, I had to get on a plane to Mexico to do a press tour for 'Get Smart.' And then I spent a week in shock at a friend's house. And then I had to go back and do more press, and I haven't stopped since,” Hathaway, 25, was quoted as saying.

She declined to offer details about Follieri and his business dealings and did not say whether she knew about them or not. But she said she had been staying at a friend’s house since she moved out of the apartment she used to share with her ex-boyfriend in New York.