ROME
Telegraph
By Alice Philipson, Rome 05 Nov 2015
A British aristocrat tried to warn the Vatican it needed to sort out its murky finances years before the full extent of the Holy See’s waste and money mismanagement emerged, a new book has revealed.
Thomas Stonor, the 7th Baron Camoys and a former prominent banker at Barclays, predicted the Vatican’s reputation would be damaged by the corrupt officials handling its money after he worked as an adviser to the Holy See between 1991 and 2006.
His strongly worded memo, sent to Vatican officials in 2004, was revealed in Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi, an Italian journalist, who lays bare the chaos of the Vatican’s finances in which millions of euros – including donations meant for the poor – are lost in waste and mismanagement.
The book’s publication on Wednesday came just days after the Vatican arrested two suspected moles for allegedly leaking confidential documents to journalists revealing gross financial mismanagement.
In the five-page letter, Baron Stonor wrote that the historic structure of the Holy See’s finances “is not only inappropriate for the 21st century but also dangerous to the resources of the Holy See and potentially to its reputation”.
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