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	Government Officials Tight-lipped on Bank Scandal Investigation The Tribune August 9, 2011 http://www.tribune242.com/08092011_italianbank_news_pg1 GOVERNMENT officials remain tightlipped over why the Bahamas government has failed to co-operate with a longstanding, multi-million dollar bank scandal investigation. Since tracing several hundred million of missing funds to accounts in the Bahamas in 2005, sources claim that local authorities have ignored official requests for assistance - the most recent of which was sent in 2008. Foreign news reports indicate that the whereabouts of hundreds of millions of dollars linked to the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano in the early 1980s is one of the biggest bank scandals in history. The tale of murder, Mafia plots, international money laundering schemes, and clandestine Masonic sects, placed the Bahamas branch of the bank, Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Limited, at the very centre of the scandal. According to the press in Italy and the UK, Italian prosecutors are looking for funds allegedly squirreled away by former bank chairman Roberto Calvi, known as "God's banker" because the Vatican Bank was the largest sharholder. In years leading up to the collapse, Calvi set up companies in the Bahamas and South America to which he funnelled hundreds of millions in bank funds. It is claimed that $800 million in total went missing. Following the bank's collapse, Calvi was found dead in London in 1982, hanging by the neck from Blackfriar's Bridge. There have been several trials and investigations into the circumstances surrounding his death. Italian courts have ruled it a murder, rumoured to be a retribution hit for the loss of Mafia money during the collapse. In 2005, Italian investigators claimed to have traced several hundred million of the missing funds to accounts in the Bahamas. The prosecutors were said to have been eager to follow this lead, however as UK newspaper The Observer reported in August of that year, "Police sources in London indicated that the authorities in the Bahamas have been slow in supplying them with details associated with the accounts." Reports in the Italian press from 2009 indicate that two years on, little had changed. Calls to Attorney General John Delaney - who would have been privy to the request sent in 2008 - for comment remain unreturned.
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