UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail – Thisis Money
By PETER CAMPBELL
Eight days after disappearing from his office, the body of an Italian financier known as ‘God’s banker’ was found hanged from Blackfriars Bridge in London.
Roberto Calvi, 61, was the President of Italy’s Ambrosiano Bank when it collapsed after making £1bn of unsecured loans to brass-plate companies in Latin America.
It is still not known for certain whether Calvi’s death, which happened three days after his secretary jumped to her death from a window of the Milan bank, was murder or suicide.
Rather than an extract from a dark thriller, this is really what happened in 1982 – just one of the controversies that has embroiled the Vatican Bank, Ambrosiano’s largest shareholder.
Three decades later, the plot surrounding the Holy See’s finances remains no less thick.
Accusations of money laundering, alleged links to the Mafia and Masonic organisations and the arrest of senior bank officials alongside former secret service agents all offer sufficient ingredients to whet any budding novelist’s appetite.
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