VATICAN CITY
Toronto Sun
PHILIP PULLELLA, REUTERS
FIRST POSTED: THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2015
VATICAN CITY – Vatican departments had more than a billion euros that were not declared on an overall balance sheet before new accounting standards kicked in last year, a financial statement showed on Thursday.
The man appointed to clean up Vatican finances said last December that departments had “tucked away” millions of euros and followed “long-established patterns” in jealously managing their affairs without reporting to any central accounting office.
Thursday’s statement showed that such funds totalled about 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), the first time the Vatican has quantified the unreported funds discovered after Cardinal George Pell took up the newly created post of economy minister.
Pope Francis picked Pell, an outsider from the English-speaking world, to oversee the Vatican’s often muddled finances after decades of control by Italians.
Pell did not suggest any wrongdoing but said the departments had long had “an almost free hand” with their finances. The Vatican said at the time that Pell was not referring to any “illegal, illicit or badly administered funds”.
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