VATICAN CITY
ABC News
By NICOLE WINFIELD, ASSOCIATED PRESS
VATICAN CITY — Dec 15, 2015
Vatican prosecutors have launched 13 new investigations into suspected money-laundering this year, and currently have frozen some 11 million euros ($12.1 million) as part of beefed-up measures to prevent illicit activity at the Vatican’s scandal-marred bank, according to a report released Tuesday.
The Council of Europe’s Moneyval committee revealed the findings in a periodic progress report on the Holy See’s compliance with international norms to fight money-laundering and terror financing.
Moneyval praised the Holy See for addressing most of the outstanding legal loopholes flagged in the committee’s original 2012 evaluation. But it said it remained unclear how the laws are being implemented, since prosecutors haven’t yet handed down any money-laundering indictments despite having 25 investigations open, half of them launched this year.
The Vatican submitted itself to the Moneyval evaluation process after it signed onto the 2009 EU Monetary Convention and in a bid to shed its image as a financially shady tax haven whose bank has long been embroiled in scandal.
In recent years, the Vatican has written and rewritten laws criminalizing money-laundering, entered into financial information-sharing agreements with dozens of countries, closed nearly 5,000 accounts at its bank and made sure it knows the background of all the clients who stayed on.
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