VATICAN CITY
The Independent (UK)
The Bank of keeping mum or being dead: The financial scandals just keep piling up for the Vatican’s money-men
MICHAEL DAY MILAN SUNDAY 14 JULY 2013
Just a month ago, in his crusade to take his flock back to basics and deliver it from the clutches of Mammon, Pope Francis said the Church “must go forward… with a heart of poverty, not a heart of investment or of a businessman”.
St Peter, he noted, “did not have a bank account”. As we learnt a few weeks later, though, the senior Vatican official Monsignor Nunzio “Don 500” Scarano certainly did – at least two of them, which, prosecutors say, he used to smuggle €20m (£17.3m) into Italy from Switzerland, and to launder money used to buy a €1.7m luxury flat in Salerno.
Don 500 – so named because of his tendency to dish money around in the form of €500 notes, the criminal’s favourite denomination – can’t be dismissed as an isolated case. Two years ago there was the affair of Evaristo “Don Bancomat” Biasini, an official working for the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, who was accused of shady financial dealings in the construction sector.
Most damaging for the Vatican is the role that its own bank, the IOR (Institute for Religious Works), may have played in these affairs. In the case of Mgr Scarano, investigators are in no doubt he used his two IOR accounts like overseas slush funds. Records show that on one occasion last year Mgr Scarano withdrew €560,000 from an IOR account in a single transaction. He is currently in the Regina Coeli prison, awaiting trial. On Friday the Vatican announced it had frozen his assets and warned that other people may be caught up in the investigation.
Aware of the IOR’s scandal-struck reputation, Pope Francis hired a new president for the institution, Baron Ernst von Freyberg, in May. The German industrialist immediately made himself a hostage to fortune, however, by declaring that the IOR was a “well-managed and clean financial institution” whose reputation was paying the price for past scandals.
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