VATICAN CITY
Chicago Tribune
Philip Pullella
Reuters
January 21, 2014
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – A former Vatican prelate on trial for an alleged plot to smuggle 20 million euros into Italy was further charged on Tuesday with laundering millions through the Vatican bank, police and his lawyer said.
Monsignor Nunzio Scarano and two other people served with arrest warrants were suspected of laundering and making false statements, police said. The others were Father Luigi Noli, a friend of Scarano suspended from his Vatican job last year, and a notary.
Fifty-two other people were being investigated on suspicion of abetting money laundering, police said.
Scarano, 61, is under house arrest in his native Salerno, near Naples, and charged with conspiring to smuggle some 20 million euros from Switzerland with a financier and a former secret services officer for rich shipbuilder friends in Salerno. The money smuggling trial began on December 3 in Rome.
The new charge, which came after a separate, year-long investigation, concerns suspected money laundering through his accounts at the Vatican bank, police said.
A police statement said millions of euros in “false donations” from offshore companies moved through Scarano’s accounts at the Vatican bank, formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR).
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