Pope Francis starts clean-up of Vatican financial system

[Sammyboy RSS Feed]

An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

The priest is known to his friends as "Monsignor 500" because of the number of €500 bills he carries around. In the earlier case, which is still under investigation, he is said to have withdrawn €560,000 from his IOR account to pay off a mortgage on his home in Salerno, south of Naples. The money, it is charged, consisted of donations by churchgoers who believed it was going towards building a home for the terminally ill. It is alleged the monsignor gave 56 friends €10,000 each in cash, asking them for cheques or money transfers in exchange, thus enabling him to pay the cheques into his personal Italian account. Father Scarano's lawyer has said that he declares himself "absolutely innocent". The home for the terminally ill, meanwhile, remains unbuilt.

The case throws garish light on an institution long regarded as a symbol of the byzantine corruption of the Vatican. Set up by Pope Pius XII in 1942, it was implicated in the tangled 1970s scandal of the bankrupt Banco Ambrosiano, in which the IOR was the major shareholder and whose boss Roberto Calvi was found hanged under London's Blackfriars Bridge, having been killed, probably, by the Sicilian Mafia. More recently, it has come under EU scrutiny on suspicion of being widely used as a tax haven in the heart of Europe. In 2010, Roman magistrates froze $33m held by the IOR in an Italian bank, charging that transparency protocols had been violated. The Vatican denied the charges.

- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...e-8679990.html


Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com.