Vatican Bank and Money Laundering

[MMM]

Vatican Bank Head in Money Laundering Probe
Tuesday, 21 Sep 2010


ROME -- The head of the Vatican bank is under investigation for suspected money laundering and police have frozen 23 million euros ($30.21 million) of its funds, Italian judicial sources said on Tuesday. Neither Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who has been at the helm of the bank for a year, nor the Vatican spokesman would comment immediately on the case, which involves alleged violations of European Union money laundering regulations.

The sources said Gotti Tedeschi and another executive of the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), as the bank is officially known, had been put under investigation by Rome magistrates Nello Rossi and Stefano Fava.

The sources said Italy's financial police had preventively frozen 23 million euros of the IOR's funds in an account in an Italian bank in Rome.

Two recent transfers from an IOR account in the Italian bank were deemed suspicious by financial police and blocked.

One was a transfer of 20 million euros to a German branch of a U.S. bank and another of 3 million euros to an Italian bank.

Gotti Tedeschi, a devout Catholic who has taught financial ethics at the Catholic University of Milan, is a close adviser to Treasury Minister Giulio Tremonti.

He is currently also head of an Italian unit of the Spanish Banco Santander , according to its website, and serves on the board of several major Italian banks.

The IOR principally manages funds for the Vatican and religious institutions around the world, such as charity organisations and religious orders of priests and nuns.

It was involved in a worldwide scandal in 1982 when it was embroiled in the fraudulent bankruptcy of Banco Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank.

The IOR held a small stake in Ambrosiano, whose president Roberto Calvi was found hanged under London's Blackfriars Bridge the same year.

Several investigations failed to determine whether Calvi, known as God's Banker, had been killed or committed suicide.

At the time the IOR was headed by American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who died in Arizona in 2006.

The Vatican denied any responsibility for the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano but made what it called a "goodwill payment" of $250 million to Ambrosiano creditors.

[atumdjeheuty]

In 2009, the Italian magazine Panorama reported that Vatican Bank was being investigated by Italian authorities from the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Banca d'Italia and the Guardia di Finanza over money laundering transactions worth €180 million (US$ 218 million) through a branch of UniCredit located at Via della Conciliazione across from St. Peter's Basilica. The bank handles accounts of the religious orders and other Catholic associations using the "offshore" (i.e., foreign) status of the Holy See.

On 21 September 2010, Italian police declared that Gotti Tedeschi and another IOR manager were under investigation for money laundering charges. €23 million were seized as a precaution. Police began an investigation regarding Tedeschi around a week before the news was made public after a division of the Bank of Italy alerted police to two transactions involving the Vatican Bank that were deemed suspicious. The money seized was bound from an Italian bank, Credito Artigianato, to JP Morgan Chase and another Italian bank, Banca del Fucino. Both the origin and destination of the funds were accounts under the control of the Vatican Bank. The Vatican Bank had allegedly failed to disclose the origin of the money, a violation of Italian law.

In a statement regarding the investigation, the Vatican said that it was "...perplexed and astonished by the initiatives of the Rome prosecutors, considering the data necessary is already available at the Bank of Italy." According to the police, the presence of the investigation did not mean either of the officials involved had been charged with a crime, and a judicial ruling would be necessary to continue the investigation.

[dracon]

they have a history, read up on them in:

Aarons, Mark; Loftus, John (1998). Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets. New York: St.Martin's Press.

Paris, Edmond. Genocide in Satellite Croatia 1941–1945. The American Institute for Balkan Affairs, 1990.

Manhattan, Avro (1986). The Vatican's Holocaust. Ozark Books.

'Mark Lombardi: Global Networks. Mark Lombardi, Robert Carleton Hobbs, Judith Richards; Independent Curators, 2003 (published for the travelling exhibition of his work, "Mark Lombardi Global Networks"). ISBN 0-916365-67-0

Charles Raw – The Moneychangers: How the Vatican Bank Enabled Roberto Calvi to Steal 250 Million Dollars for the Heads of the P2 Masonic Lodge (Harvill Press, 1992) ISBN 0-00-217338-7

[Alorea]

Vatican Banking Fraud Probe Widens: Church 'Astonished' It Must Adhere to Money Laundering Laws
Published on 10-22-2010

Source: Activist Post

The Associated Press reported today that the Vatican expressed "astonishment" when an Italian court rejected the release of Vatican bank funds seized by authorities for failing to comply with international money laundering laws.

Prosecutors claim that the $30 million seizure that occurred last month is due to non-disclosure of the transfer destination of large sums of money. Although the Vatican bank -- Institute for Works of Religion -- vows that it is working within international banking rules, the prosecutor found "exactly the opposite" was true. The AP reported:

Under the investigation, financial police seized the money Sept. 21 from a Vatican bank account at the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano Spa, after the bank informed the Bank of Italy about possible violations of anti-money laundering norms. The bulk of the money, euro20 million ($26 million), was destined for JP Morgan in Frankfurt, with the remainder going to Banca del Fucino.


The prosecutors' document suggests confirmation of Italian press reports that the probe was widening, looking into possible violations in earlier years linked to Italian corruption, in addition to the two most recent cases.

The document cites suspicious transactions involving checks drawn from a Vatican bank account at Unicredit bank in 2009, involving the use of a false name.

The prosecutors also cited a euro650,000 withdrawal from a Vatican ban account at Intesa San Paolo bank where the Vatican didn't specify the money's ultimate destination despite a specific request by the Italian bank.

The prosecutors called this "a deliberate failure to observe the anti-laundering laws with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital." The Italian banks have declined comment.

This is not the first major banking fraud case involving the Vatican. They were involved in one of the largest banking fraud cases in Italy following the mysterious 1980s collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, a scandal that was shrouded in murder and deceit, where:

Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had made to several dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans.

While denying any wrongdoing, the Vatican bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano's creditors.

It appears that this new Catholic Church banking fraud scandal is not unusual for the Vatican, and probably a welcome distraction from sex scandals. In the end, a modest fine will likely be paid, or perhaps a low-level paper pusher will be sacrificed to the authorities. Such is the modern justice for large institutional sinners.