VATICAN CITY
The Telegraph
[MONEYVAL’s first evaluation report on the Holy See – Council of Europe]
The Vatican has passed a key test on meeting financial transparency standards, but has received poor grades on its new watchdog’s ability to prevent money laundering.
By Nick Squires, in Vatican City
7:00AM BST 19 Jul 2012
The Council of Europe on Wednesday released a report that marked a milestone in the Holy See’s efforts to shed its reputation as a shady tax haven long mired in secrecy and scandal.
The report showed the Vatican had received compliant or largely compliant grades on nine of the 16 “key and core” internationally recognised recommendations to fight money laundering and terrorist financing.
But seven other areas were found lacking, particularly its anti-terror finance measures and the Vatican’s financial oversight agency, created amid much fanfare in 2010 to try to respond to international demands for greater fiscal transparency to win a place on the “white list” of financially transparent countries.
The report found the agency had yet to conduct any inspections, and that its role, authority and independence needed clarification. The so-called Moneyval committee praised the Holy See for making so much progress in a short amount of time, but said more needs to be done. “We take both the praise and criticism contained in the report with seriousness,” said Monsignor Ettore Balestrero, undersecretary of state and the head of the Vatican delegation to the Moneyval committee
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