VATICAN CITY
BBC News
By David Willey
BBC News, Rome
When I first settled in Rome in the early 1970s, it was common knowledge among resident foreign journalists that you could get a much better exchange rate for the Italian lira from your dollars or pounds by visiting the Vatican’s own bank, situated inside a medieval tower next to the Apostolic Palace inside Vatican City.
So, showing my press pass, I climbed the stairs into this strange Holy of Holies, where the only other clients in the marble-lined banking hall were priests and nuns.
I wrote out a cheque, which the bank clerk cashed after checking my identity. He handed me about 10% more lira than if I had made the transaction in one of the commercial banks just down the street in Italian territory. I had just discovered my very own offshore fiscal paradise.
Thus began my short-lived but instructive introductory course into Vatican banking. A few months later, someone leaked what was happening and I could no longer gain access to the Vatican’s financial inner sanctum.
Divine appreciation
Then I got to know the Most Reverend Paul Marcinkus, a giant of a priest, who hailed from Chicago, and who had been appointed by Pope Paul VI in 1971 to head the Vatican Bank, the “Institute for the Works of Religion”, or IOR in Italian.
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