VATICAN CITY
The Economist
Pope Francis grapples with his bank—the first of many problems
Jul 6th 2013 | VATICAN CITY |From the print edition
IT IS in the Vatican, but neither an institution of the city-state, nor part of the Roman Curia, the Catholic church’s central administration. It is only half a bank (it takes deposits, but does not give loans). Yet the blandly named Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR) has caused endless discomfort to recent popes.
The problems go back to at least 1982 when the IOR was involved in the fraudulent bankruptcy of Banco Ambrosiano. In June of that year the Italian bank’s chairman, Roberto Calvi, was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London. The latest scandal is less grisly, but equally bizarre. On July 1st the IOR’s director, Paolo Cipriani, and his deputy, Massimo Tulli, resigned three days after the Italian authorities arrested and jailed a Vatican cleric, Monsignor Nunzio Scarano. He is accused of bribery as part of a plot to smuggle €20m ($26m) in cash into Italy from Switzerland on a private jet. He was claimed to have paid €400,000 to an alleged fellow-conspirator, a non-commissioned officer in the Carabinieri (the Italian gendarmerie) working with the domestic spy agency.
The intelligence officer and the other alleged member of the plot, a financial broker, were said to have met through a Catholic order of chivalry. Documents presented to a judge suggest Mr Tulli and Mr Cipriani helped clear transactions involved in the case. It is hard to imagine a story more likely to reinforce the sinister, esoteric image of the Vatican propagated by authors such as Dan Brown in “The Da Vinci Code”.
According to Italian prosecutors, the intelligence officer got to Switzerland, but returned empty-handed when the broker failed to deliver the cash, allegedly entrusted to him by a Neapolitan shipping family (which denies any suggestion of tax-dodging). Monsignor Scarano, a banker who came unusually late in life to holy orders, was already a suspect in a separate money-laundering investigation involving rich friends from his home town of Salerno. He has denied wrongdoing in that case, but his lawyer said he did not dispute the facts of the bribery investigation. He would, however, contest the prosecutors’ accusations on a point of law. The monsignor had been merely trying “to help out his friends”, he said.
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