VATICAN CITY
International Business Times
By Christine Gaylican | March 14, 2013
The new leader of the Catholic Church, Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio or Pope Francis, who shares to have lived a simple life, will be overwhelmed at how much money the Vatican Bank holds at this time.
Because disclosure is not practiced, records as to how much in assets the bank holds was only as of 2011, estimated at $8.2 billion.
Vatican’s tall order of secrecy and bureaucracy is now running in conflict with international banking laws that seek to gather enough information to battle money laundering globally.
This is one of the thorny issues that his predecessor Pope Benedict IV tried to address months before he stepped down by appointing a German aristocrat and industrialist Ernst von Freyberg as head of the Vatican Bank.
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