Italian Priest Arrested for Fraud

The Tablet UK
April 9, 2013

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/latest-news/5184

An Italian priest has been arrested for embezzling more than €4 million from a Rome clinic owned by his religious order and forcing the facility into bankruptcy after accumulating some €600 million of debt.

Fr Franco Decaminada, 68, was placed under house arrest on 4 April for misappropriating funds from the Istituto Dermatologico dell'Immacolota (IDI), of which he was the executive director from 2004-11. The clinic was founded in 1925 by his order, the Congregation of the Sons of the Immaculate Conception.

Italian police also arrested two of Fr Decaminada's lay business associates for embezzling a further €10 million and they impounded a country home worth more than €1million that the priest had purchased in Tuscany. Earlier this year it was reported that some 1,500 medical personnel at the clinic had not been paid for months. Pope Benedict XVI in February transferred control of the IDI to a Vatican cardinal.