UNITED STATES
Yahoo! Finance
By Nicole Goodkind
The Vatican Bank is one of the most mysterious institutions in the world. The completely independent financial institution is run by the Catholic Church, and until 2013, had never released so much as a financial report.
Pope Francis is finally attempting to shed some light on the fabled bank. Under his watch, investigators have closed more than 3,000 suspect accounts, long-standing bank officials have been fired and the institution now serves only Catholic institutions, clergymen and diplomats within the Vatican. The pope even reportedly considered closing the bank after a scandal in January of 2014 where Msgr. Nunzio Scarano, then-accountant for the Vatican’s real estate holdings, was arrested for attempting to use the bank to smuggle and launder millions of Euros.
In his book, “God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican,” investigative journalist Gerald Posner, who was raised Catholic, dives deep into the shrouded history of the Vatican Bank. That history includes sordid stories of financial alliances with Germany during World War II, and Italian mobsters in the 1980s.
Prior to 1942, the Vatican handled its money elsewhere but during WWII decided it needed its own bank. “Why did the Vatican need a central bank all of a sudden?” Posner asks. “It needed it because the Americans and British were trying to stop money going to Nazi Germany, and the Vatican knew that. It wanted to play both sides of the game by making money with the West and making money with the Italian and Germans, and the only way to do that was to have its own bank.” He alleges that the Vatican Bank would knowingly invest in companies through Italian proxies that would steal money from Holocaust victims.
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