VATICAN CITY
The Associated Press
By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican bank, one of the most secretive institutions in the secrecy-obsessed Vatican, opened itself up to a little external scrutiny Thursday in a bid to show it’s serious about fighting money-laundering and being more financially transparent.
During a nearly three-hour power-point presentation to a few dozen journalists, the bank’s director, Paolo Cipriani, highlighted the peculiar nature of the Institute for Religious Works, the institute’s official name, and stressed its internal and external financial controls.
But more importantly, he sought to refute media allegations that the institution has been less than cooperative with requests for financial information from banks such as JPMorgan and Italian authorities.
At one point, Cipriani displayed a letter from Italy’s financial police thanking him for his “timely and exhaustive response” in signaling a suspect transaction to them even before the Vatican’s new anti-money laundering law went into effect last year. And he described in detail the exhaustive checks carried out by the institute to ensure that the money that comes into and out of its accounts is clean.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.