Vatican Employs New Anti-money Laundering Expert

By Andrea Tornielli
Vatican Insider
September 13, 2012

http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/the-vatican/detail/articolo/ior-moneyval-18052/

Financial trasparency in the Vatican: A new expert arrives

After employing American journalist Greg Burke as Communications Advisor for the Secretary of State, the Vatican has now announced the arrival of another high profile advisor. The Holy See has recruited Fribourg-born Swiss lawyer and anti-money laundering expert, Rene Bruelhart to further the work being done to get the Vatican in line with international standards. Vatican Radio reported the news today.

“Following the Moneyval report on the Vatican and the Holy See, which received extensive coverage during the month of July, the time is ripe, not for a slackening of commitment, but for renewed efforts to respond to the Report’s recommendations and ever more efficaciously pursue transparency and financial trustworthiness, thus contributing more effectively to the fight against money-laundering. A powerful sign of its commitment to work in this direction is that the Holy See has hired an international expert in Anti-Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) activities,” Vatican Radio reported.

Rene Bruelhart, 40, a lawyer originally from Fribourg, Switzerland, spent eight years as the director of Liechtenstein’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), and is an expert in AML/CFT. As director of Liechtenstein’s FIU, he was also appointed in 2010 as the vice-chair of the Egmont Group, the global network of FIUs. Bruelhart began work this month as a consultant to the Holy See in all matters related to AML/CFT. His arrival does not imply any cuts to the personnel already working on ensuring that the Holy See fulfils Moneyval’s requirements: a taxing task for the Secretariat of State. Bruelhart’s considerable experience in the field should help speed the process of meeting international money laundering regulations up. The Holy See needs to satisfy Moneyval on all the points where it scored unsatisfactory or not completely satisfactory ratings in the committee’s recent report.

Interestingly, the new advisor is not an Italian. In an interview with Vatican Insider last August, American lawyer Jeffrey Lena, who works with the Holy See and helped write the new anti-money laundering law, stated (referring to Italy): “In terms of financial activities, the IOR has links with more than a hundred countries; it has banking relations with forty of these and maintains relations with financial bodies in all EU member states. But as far as I know, only one of these countries treats the Vatican unequally, that is, differently in terms of anti-money laundering.