CANADA
The Globe and Mail
MICHAEL BABAD
The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jan. 24 2014
The Vatican is moving forcefully to repair its scandal-prone bank.
The Instituto per le Opere di Religione, commonly known as the Vatican bank, this week released a report that highlights a year of reforms, including bolstering measures to fight money laundering.
That came just a week after Pope Francis overhauled the bank’s oversight group, replacing many of its members with new faces, including the respected Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto.
The new pope isn’t making his mark solely on religious, social and economic inequality issues, but also on the Vatican’s wealthy bank, which posted a 2012 profit of almost €87-million and sits on billions in bonds, stocks, cash and equivalents, gold and real estate.
“As an Institute of the Church we have a particular responsibility to live up to the high standards that are rightly expected of us,” Vatican bank president Ernst von Freyberg, who was brought on board in 2013, said in this week’s report.
The bank’s supervisory board, which has been overhauling processes for a year now, said it received a status report on how things have been going, including an update on the reforms to “adopt best practice compliance risk management and to comply with current Vatican anti-money laundering legislation.”
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