Vatican bank head blames 'error' for probe
September 22 2010 at 11:08AM
Rome - An “error of procedure” at the Vatican bank is being exploited to attack the Vatican with a money-laundering investigation, the bank’s president said in an interview published on Wednesday.
Vatican bank officials are under investigation for suspected money laundering and police have frozen €23-million (about R220-million) of its funds, Italian judicial sources said on Tuesday.
The bank’s president Ettore Gotti Tedeschi told financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore he felt humiliated by the investigation and that it was all centred around a mistake.
“An error of procedure is being used as an excuse to attack the institute, its president and the Vatican in general,” Gotti Tedeschi told the paper.
He said the operation in question “was a normal treasury operation and it involved a transfer from accounts of the Vatican bank to other accounts of the Vatican bank.”
He added that in the past 10 months the bank “has been adapting all its internal procedures to be in harmony with international transparency standards.”
Gotti Tedeschi and the bank’s director-general Paolo Cipriani have been put under investigation by Rome magistrates Nello Rossi and Stefano Fava in a case involving alleged violations of European Union money laundering regulations.
The Vatican expressed “perplexity and amazement” at the actions by the Rome magistrates and “utmost faith” in the two men who head the bank, officially known as the Institute for Religious Works (IOR).
The judicial sources said Italy’s financial police had preventively frozen 23 million euros of the IOR’s funds in an account in an Italian bank in Rome.
Two recent transfers from an IOR account in the Italian bank were deemed suspicious by financial police and blocked. One was a transfer of 20 million euros to a German branch of a US bank and another of €3-million to an Italian bank.
The IOR principally manages funds for the Vatican and religious institutions around the world, such as charity organisations and religious orders of priests and nuns. - Reuters
A FORENSIC audit into alleged maladministration in the George diocese of the Anglican Church has revealed R6-million has gone missing from the church coffers.
A Port Elizabeth auditing firm was appointed to investigate 1000 suspect transactions in the diocese after allegations of mismanagement surfaced at the beginning of last year...
He said the missing funds had been held by the church on behalf of parishes in the area and as such [i]did not affect the payment of salaries to the clergy[/i] or the function of the church’s charitable role.
“There has been no reduction in the number of clergy or in the church’s charitable work in the community, but of course it has had an effect on cash flow. It is business as usual,” Rogerson said.
Does anybody really care if the church - who it seems has been stealing money - still has enough money left after the theft to pay the people who work for them? Ahem... 'business as usual' indeed. Lies, corruption, and bullshit.
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Italian authorities have seized $30 million from Vatican accounts and placed the bank's president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, and chief executive, Paolo Cipriani, under investigation
Something else that slipped most newspapers and commentators attention in the 90’s; - Wouter Basson during his amnesty hearing was reported to have diverted about US$20 Million from the Catholic Church War Fund. At the time I was surprised that all the attention was on Wouter with nobody questioning why the Catholic Church has a war fund.