VATICAN CITY
Corriere della Sera
Pope Francis looks set to intervene at the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) before summer. Action is likely to come before 31 July, when IOR will complete its internal investigation of customers’ accounts. At this stage, the question is not so much “if” as “when”. And as rumours mount of an upcoming court order against the Vatican bank’s executives, the pace could quicken rapidly. Some of the facts are well established. The first is that Californian lawyer Jeff Lena, the man who in the past few years has become a key figure and string-puller for IOR reform, broke off relations a couple of months ago with Ernst Von Freyberg, the IOR chairman and ally of managing director Paolo Cipriani. Rumours say Mr Lena, who in the recent struggle to eject former chair Ettore Gotti Tedeschi worked in harness with the IOR board and Mr Cipriani himself, now misses the clashes he had with the Piacenza-based Gotti Tedeschi, who was unceremoniously turfed out just over a year ago.
At the time, Mr Gotti Tedeschi’s finger-pointing at the Vatican Secretariat of State and IOR management’s attempts to water down money-laundering regulations was dismissed as baseless. Demography expert Gotti Tedeschi was said to have been removed because he did not know IOR and failed to defend it, criticisms that circulated, and were in part subscribed, but were also tendentious. After three months in office, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is said to be firmly convinced that IOR taketh from the Church much more than it giveth in terms of image, international credibility and suspicion over the modus operandi of the only institution that reports directly to the Vatican. For weeks, the issue has been bouncing back and forward from the Secretariat of State to the Vatican City Governorate and APSA (Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See), the nerve ends of the Curia’s economic power.
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