VATICAN CITY
Telegraph
By Nick Squires, in Rome 08 Jul 2014
A “painful” restructuring of the Vatican’s scandal-ridden bank in order to weed out suspicious activity has resulted in a massive fall in profits and the closure of hundreds of customer accounts, it disclosed on Tuesday.
A year-long push for greater transparency and accountability, spearheaded by Ernst von Freyburg, a German lawyer, has resulted in the bank’s net profits falling from £69m (€86.6m) in 2012 to just £2.3m (€2.9m) in 2013.
The bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion or IOR, has blocked the accounts of more than 2,000 individual and institutional clients and ended around 3,000 “customer relationships” as part of the sweeping clean-up process.
The closing of the accounts led to an outflow of funds amounting to €44m, the bank revealed in its latest financial statement. Most of the money was transferred by wire to Italian financial institutions. Another 359 customer accounts were “earmarked for closure”, the bank said.
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