ROME
Daily Mail

By Philip Pullella

ROME, Jan 18 (Reuters) – A former Vatican prelate was acquitted on Monday of conspiring to smuggle millions of euros in cash into Italy from Switzerland for rich friends.

Monsignor Nunzio Scarano worked for 22 years as a senior accountant in APSA, a Vatican department that handles real estate and stock investments for the Holy See.

He was dismissed from his post after Italian magistrates charged him in June 2013 with plotting, along with an Italian secret service agent and a financial broker, to smuggle 20 million euros ($21.8 million) into Italy.

Prosecutors said a private plane had gone to Locarno in Switzerland in 2012 to pick up the cash and bring it into Italy without tax and customs controls. The plane returned without the cash because of last-minute complications at the Swiss bank where it was being held, officials said at the…