ROME
Gazzetta del Sud
Rome, March 28 – A Rome judge on Friday upheld a request from prosecutors to shelve an investigation into the former head of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, over alleged money laundering. In 2010 the probe led in to the freezing of 23 million euros over two cash transfers involving the bank that were deemed suspicious. Gotti Tedeschi resigned from the bank, whose official name is the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), in May 2012 following a no-confidence vote by the supervisory board, amid reported disagreements on efforts to get the Vatican on the white list of financially transparent countries. The image of the bank has been hit by a series of scandals over the years. Italian banks effectively stopped dealing with the IOR in 2010 after the Bank of Italy ordered them to enforce strict anti-money laundering criteria to continue working with it. From January 1 to February 12 last year the Bank of Italy froze all credit-card and ATM transactions inside the Vatican City over its failure to fully implement international anti-money-laundering standards.
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