VATICAN CITY
European CEO
By Jules GrayThursday, March 20th, 2014
The murder of Roberto Calvi in 1982 put the spotlight on corruption at the Vatican Bank. Recent allegations hint that the Catholic Church’s financial arm still isn’t without sin
With more than a billion members, the Catholic Church is the largest Christian church on the planet. Despite its colossal reach, it has garnered a reputation over its two millennia in operation of intense secrecy.
Headquartered in the Vatican City in the heart of Rome, the church’s vast power includes a considerable amount of financial influence, which means it has its own bank; a private institution that is governed by Cardinals and the Pope and has around $7bn in assets.
Unlike many traditional banks, the Vatican Bank has maintained the mysterious – and highly controversial – reputation of the religion it serves. Officially known as the Instituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR), it has been accused of a number of misdeeds over the last century, the most serious of which have been regarding money laundering.
However, the most damning scandal to hit the IOR was the Banco Ambrosiano affair that broke in the early 1980’s, and all of the subsequent stories that were connected to it. It resulted in the supposed murder of that bank’s chairman, Roberto Calvi, who had such an influence with the IOR and the Catholic Church that he was dubbed ‘God’s Banker’ by the media.
Such was the magnitude of the story that it has been linked to the death of Pope John Paul I a few years earlier, and provided the inspiration for the plot of The Godfather Part III. The scandal first broke in 1978 when the Bank of Italy (BOI) unveiled a report that said Banco Ambrosiano was heading for a disaster as a result of mismanagement and corruption. The IOR was implicated in the scandal because it was the main shareholder in Banco Ambrosiano.
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