BishopAccountability.org

Vatican Bank profits tumble after accounts clean up

By Nick Squires
Telegraph
July 8, 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/10954265/Vatican-Bank-profits-tumble-after-accounts-clean-up.html

Swiss guards at St Peter's Basilica mass in Vatican City. The Vatican Bank has blocked the accounts of more than 2,000 individual and institutional clients and ended around 3,000 "customer relationships" as part of the sweeping clean-up process

A “painful” restructuring of the Vatican’s scandal-ridden bank in order to weed out suspicious activity has resulted in a massive fall in profits and the closure of hundreds of customer accounts, it disclosed on Tuesday.

A year-long push for greater transparency and accountability, spearheaded by Ernst von Freyburg, a German lawyer, has resulted in the bank’s net profits falling from £69m (€86.6m) in 2012 to just £2.3m (€2.9m) in 2013.

The bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion or IOR, has blocked the accounts of more than 2,000 individual and institutional clients and ended around 3,000 "customer relationships" as part of the sweeping clean-up process.

The closing of the accounts led to an outflow of funds amounting to €44m, the bank revealed in its latest financial statement. Most of the money was transferred by wire to Italian financial institutions. Another 359 customer accounts were “earmarked for closure”, the bank said.

Long mired in accusations of money laundering and other financial irregularities, the bank has been put back on the straight and narrow by Mr von Freyburg with the help of a team of 30 experts from the Promontory Financial Group.

They scrutinised and screened the more than 17,000 accounts held by the bank.

The huge drop in net profits was due to write-downs on millions of pounds’ worth of bad investments in externally-managed funds, made before the reform process began last year, as well as to the €8.3m in fees paid to the financial team from Promontory.

“At the beginning of my mandate, I repeatedly said that I would proceed with zero tolerance for any suspicious activity,” Mr von Freyberg said in a statement.

“It is fair to say that over the past months this often painful but very necessary process has opened the door to a new, unburdened future of the IOR - as a financial service provider that is fully and solely dedicated to serving the mission of the Catholic Church.”

Promontory’s experts found some evidence of suspicious financial activities, which are being investigated by the Vatican’s finance watchdog, the Financial Information Authority.

But the bank insisted that the vast majority of accounts that were closed were owned by respectable people who no longer qualified to be customers because of tighter new regulations rather than any wrongdoing.

“We’ve not thrown these people out because they are criminals,” Max Hohenberg, the bank’s spokesman, told The Telegraph.

“These are lay people who do not fall within four categories that we laid down last July – that customers must be Catholic institutions, individual clergy, employees and pensioners of the Vatican or diplomats accredited to the Holy See.

“So there could be a former Swiss Guard who has ended his service and returned to Switzerland, or foreign ambassadors who are no longer posted to Rome, or doctors who worked for former pontiffs.”

The clean-up was initiated by Pope Benedict XVI but quickened by Pope Francis after his election in March 2013.

It has been costly but appears to have succeeded in turning around the bank’s fortunes - so far this year it has made a net profit of €57.4m.

Now that accounts have been closed and dubious investments off-loaded, a second phase of reform will begin, involving the slimming down of the bank’s remit and the replacement of Mr von Freyburg by Jean-Baptise de Franssu, a French businessman.

Those changes are expected to be announced on Wednesday by Cardinal George Pell, an Australian who heads the Vatican’s Secretariat of the Economy.

The bank has been dogged by accusations of intrigue and even dealings with the Mafia since the 1970s.

Its darkest hour came with the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, where the Holy See was the main shareholder, which was accused of laundering money for the Sicilian mob.

The chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, Roberto Calvi - dubbed "God's Banker" - was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 in a suspected murder by mobsters for which no one has ever been convicted.

 




.


Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.