VATICAN CITY
The Raw Story
By Agence France-Presse
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Pope Francis intensified the fight against corruption in the Vatican on Thursday, strengthening the law to counter “money laundering, the financing of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
The short “Motu Proprio”, a decree of Francis’s own initiative, strengthens the supervision of financial transactions “in response to a recommendation of the Moneyval Committee,” the European watchdog which carried out a review of the Vatican bank last year.
The decree is just the latest in a series of bold moves on the part of the pontiff to clean up the institution’s murky financial image.
“It is a means of ensuring the road (towards transparency) continues,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said in a press conference.
“In today’s world, it is all about resisting increasingly insidious forms of financial criminality. We have to be equal to the challenges in order to protect legality, and not be left behind,” he said.
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