VATICAN CITY
Bloomberg
By Andrew Frye Jul 8, 2014
Pope Francis plans to replace the board and executives at the Vatican Bank after a year of reorganization at the scandal-plagued institution in which more than 2,000 accounts were blocked and profit dropped 97 percent.
“With the support of the Holy Father and the Council of Cardinals, we are creating simpler more efficient structures for serving the mission of the Catholic Church,” Cardinal-Prefect George Pell said today in an e-mailed statement. Net income at the bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR, plummeted to 2.9 million euros ($3.9 million) from 86.6 million euros in 2012.
Francis, 77, has focused on improving transparency and compliance at the IOR, which was tainted last year when a senior Vatican cleric was arrested in Italy on fraud charges. The pope relied on Chairman Ernst von Freyberg, appointed last year under Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, to comb through the bank’s accounts and holdings for mispriced assets and suspicious accounts.
The profit decline was primarily due to a 16.5 million-euro trading loss tied to writedowns and fluctuations in the value of the IOR’s gold reserves. The trading result was 51.1 million euros last year. The IOR blocked accounts for 1,329 individual clients and 762 institutional clients, it said.
The Vatican’s Finance Ministry will hold a press conference tomorrow to outline its new strategy for the bank.
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