Vaticano Spa (Vatican Ltd): John Paul II was the CEO of the trillion dollar Vatican Bank’s murky financial dealings
Immediately after John Paul II’s death, Benedict XVI, as the newly elected pope, removed the 5-year waiting period for a proper investigation of sainthood into the life of John Paul II. Last December, he elevated John Paul II as “Venerable” meaning he lived a life of heroic virtues. It was exactly the same time that the John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army erupted in Ireland. See http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2010/01/biggest-vatican-stories-of-decade-john.html
In 2005, at the same time that Benedict XVI was hastily paving John Paul II’s speedy canonization, 7 of Europe’s most prominent theologians sent him a special letter proving John Paul II’s disqualifications for sainthood. These theologians were silenced see first article in our weblogs http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html.
John Paul II’s mishandling of the Vatican Bank was one of those reasons why he does not qualify to be a saint.
A investigative book has surfaced as a bestseller in Italy, Vatican Spa or Vatican Limited, and it cites John Paul II’s role in the corrupt Vatican Bank..
We post both articles for your perusal.
Benedict XVI is in a hurry to canonize John Paul II because it is a political strategy to revive the political clout of the papacy and the Vatican. It is up to us Catholics to prevent this from happening. We can see now, in hindsight, that John Paul II did not have the charity of Mother Teresa. He never “saw Christ” in anyone of the victims of the John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army which he led for over 26 years, the longest papacy (next to the martyr St. Peter). Mother Teresa “saw Christ” among the dying non-Christian Hindus of Calcutta. John Paul II traveled all over the world and he did not “see Christ”, not even once, among the Catholic children who were survivors pedophile priests. See John Paul II did not have the charity of Mother Teresa http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2009/11/john-paul-ii-did-not-have-charity-of.html
Comments from “The Vatican's Dirty Secrets: Bribery, Money Laundering and Mafia Connections”
---About the sanity of those who worship the pope dude as an infallible demigod. He parades around in a getup that's so expensive it would make Armani's best seem like something out of the Goodwill thrift store. The outrageous opulence of the churches themselves speaks of almost unlimited wealth. Then there's that palace at the Vatican. It makes the White House look like a tarpaper shack in comparison. I have to wonder how much better off the mostly dirt-poor subjects of this ongoing scam would be if the wealth of the church was evenly divided among them.
---Since the "birth" of "organized religion" it has been used to calm the masses and rip them off! These are the same people that heralded the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, and hide the priests from justice!
And yet they wonder why they are loosing credibility?!?!?! HELLO!
---It wouldn't be surprising when you consider the amount of collection plates needed to generate money to properly maintain that palatial estate in Rome.
Libro “Vaticano S.p.A.” di Gianluigi Nuzzi. Video
Le interviste del blog beppegrillo.it: Gianluigi Nuzzi Dal Blog di Beppe Grillo si riporta: Guarda, in dettaglio, il video sotto: L'Italia del dopoguerra si ...
vodpod.com/watch/1714348-vaticano-s-p-a-
http://www.encyclopedia.com/video/G2vqycZMtAU-vaticano-spa-intervista-allautore-gianluigi.aspx Video of author in the Vatican (in Italian)
by Gianluigi Nuzzi
Vatican's conspiracy of silence
ITALY
Guardian (United Kingdom)
Roberto Mancini guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 February 2010
Vaticano Spa (Vatican Ltd) a book about the murky financial dealings of the Catholic church (The subtitle reads: "from a secret archive – the truth about the church's financial and political scandals") has been a runaway success in Italy. Written by journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi and published by the Milan independent publisher Chiarelettere last year, more than 200,000 copies have been sold.
What's all the more astonishing is that this success has been in spite of being ignored by almost all the Italian media, with the exception of a single television programme on La 7, hosted by Gad Lerner.
Why the conspiracy of silence surrounding an Italian bestseller? Why aren't television, newspapers and magazines celebrating the success of a colleague? After all, Nuzzi has written for the Berlusconi family-owned weekly Panorama and now is a journalist for the daily Libero, considered to be the prime minister's house journal.
The explanation, according to Nuzzi, whom I asked for a comment for this article, lies in the subject matter:
"We thought that Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), as he had promised, would have sorted out the Vatican finances after the scandal of Cardinal Marcinkus and the IOR (the pope's bank).
"But during the 80s and 90s, the whole system of shady deals and bribes was inherited by Marcinkus's successors and became increasingly dishonest and cynical. The pope knew about it, but did nothing to remove the heads of this power network.
"The book, Vaticano Spa, steps inside the sacred palaces and uncovers secrets thanks to the huge archive bequeathed by monsignor Renato Dardozzi, who was summoned to join the 'perestroika' working on the Holy See's finances. My inquiry, which has the merit of not being anti-clerical, was considered the best selling non-fiction title in Italy for 2009 by the American Nielsen ratings.
"But, owing to some form of self-censorship, the television networks have ignored it, possibly because the church still inspires unconditional obsequiousness and fearful reverence. A lost opportunity because this is the first time that the most reserved documents from the pope's bank have been made available."
Aside from the desire not to offend the church, there are underlying political reasons that explain the reluctance of Berlusconi's private and the state-controlled public television channels to publicise this model of journalistic inquiry.
To summarise. For 20 years, until 2007, the CEI (the permanent Episcopal Conference of Italian Bishops) was ruled by cardinal Camillo Ruini, the vicar-general of the diocese of Rome. In Ruini's view, the church should be a pro-Berlusconi political party and he sought out and created ties both with the Northern League with its pantomime paganism and with the so-called "pious atheists" – ie, some of Berlusconi's most fervent supporters in the press. The most influential among these are Giuliano Ferrara, the founder and editor of Il Foglio (which belongs to Veronica Lario, the soon-to-be-divorced Mrs Berlusconi) and Vittorio Feltri, the editor-in-chief of Il Giornale (which belongs to Berlusconi's brother).
Ruini's successor, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, believed his predecessor was too openly favourable towards centre-right extremists. Furthermore, Berlusconi's involvement in endless sex scandals and his unbridled lifestyle had become a source of embarrassment to the church. As a result, Bertone encouraged Avvenire, the CEI's daily paper to distance itself from Berlusconi's hedonism, scandals and pending legal problems.
Alarmed that the church was considering an alliance with a future PDL (Berlusconi's party) but excluding Berlusconi himself, the "pious atheists" – the prime minister's National Guards – rode to the rescue.
Vittorio Feltri wrote a front page editorial in his newspaper demanding (and obtaining) the resignation of the editor of l'Avvenire, Dino Boffo. Boffo was accused of hypocrisy for daring to criticise Berlusconi's lifestyle while he himself had been involved in a case of homosexual harassment. The accusation proved false, but Feltri raised the stakes by insinuating he had been informed of the forged document against Boffo by a Vatican source. The mysterious informer was apparently someone in the entourage of Giovanni Maria Vian, the very powerful editor-in-chief of the Vatican daily paper, l'Osservatore Romano.
Against such a background, Nuzzi's outstanding investigation and its astonishing revelations (such as secret accounts registered to charities for research into leukaemia but used to protect high-profile clients) have become a pawn in the gang war in the Curia which Berlusconi's most fanatical supporters have every interest in exacerbating.
Meanwhile the church's unlawful activities, as revealed by the book, seem neither to bother nor to scandalise many people in Italy, perhaps because since the days of Luther, Italian cynics know that the church is an organ of power and that it has little to do with religious sentiment.
• Translated from Italian by Judy Segor
--------------
How the Vatican sold its soul
A new book by the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi lays bare a history of political bribes being paid through the Vatican's central bank
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/03/vatican-central-bank
Excertps
• Comments (45)
• Philip Willan
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 June 2009 20.00 BST
The Vatican appears to have an enduring vocation for Italian political and financial scandal. Secrecy and intrigue were the order of the day when American archbishop Paul Marcinkus held sway in the Bastion of Nicholas V, the medieval tower housing the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), the Vatican's central bank.
The requirements of a clandestine global struggle against atheist communism may explain the choice of business partners such as Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, whose mafia links and ruinous bankruptcies brought lasting discredit on the Catholic church three decades ago.
The Vatican hoped that a goodwill payment of $240m to the creditors of Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano's would salve its conscience and erase the memory of Marcinkus's inept and dishonest banking practices. We were led to believe that a new broom, wielded by the lay banker Angelo Caloia, had since swept the premises of the IOR.
The process of reform has been slower and more painful than previously thought, however, to judge by a new book, Vaticano Spa ("Vatican Ltd"), by the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi. According to Nuzzi, despite the best efforts of Caloia, a cavalier attitude to financial ethics appears to have continued well into the 1990s, with huge political bribes being laundered through the IOR and funds donated for charitable purposes or to pay for masses for the souls of the dead being casually misappropriated by the bank's administrators.
Nuzzi's allegations are based on internal IOR documents, more than 4,000 in all, that were smuggled out of the Vatican by a disgruntled employee. This unique violation of IOR confidentiality was made possible by an unlikely whistleblower, Monsignor Renato Dardozzi. An electronic engineer who held a top job at the state telecommunications company, Dardozzi discovered his vocation late in life and was ordained a priest at the age of 52.
He worked in the IOR under Marcinkus, participated in the joint Vatican/Italian commission that examined the IOR's role in the Ambrosiano saga, and witnessed Caloia's uphill struggle against the personnel and practices of the Marcinkus era.
Monsignor Donato De Bonis, who served as secretary general under Marcinkus, continued to work under the new regime.
In 1987, according to Nuzzi, De Bonis set up the Cardinal Francis Spellman Foundation, with its own account at the IOR. Signatories on the account included De Bonis himself. During its first six years of operation the account received some 50bn lire (£22m) and paid out 43bn.
The choice of the staunchly anti-communist Spellman as "patron" of the fund is interesting. The well-connected cardinal of New York earned the sobriquet "money-bags" for his fund-raising skills and earmarked significant sums for Italy's Christian Democrat party during the cold war years.
The Spellman fund seems to have been administered by De Bonis with promiscuous generosity. A variety of convents and clerics were to benefit, with payments ranging from the modest 1m lire paid to five mother superiors, to the $50,000 sent to the auxiliary bishop of Skopje-Prizen, for the Albanian-speaking faithful, and the $1m delivered to Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves, the archbishop of Sao Salvador de Bahia in Brazil.
There were also payments of a more personal nature: 100m lire for one of the lawyers of Giulio Andreotti, the veteran Christian Democrat politician, $134,000 for a conference on Cicero in New York sponsored by the former prime minister, and even a 60m lire payment to Severino Citaristi, a former treasurer of the Christian Democrat party convicted on corruption charges.
Part of the massive Enimont bribe, paid to politicians to secure their approval for a reorganisation of the chemicals sector, was also bounced through the Spellman fund, according to Nuzzi. But Caloia and Dardozzi chose discretion over transparency when questioned about it by prosecutors from Milan. "Despite the full collaboration promised and publicised in the press, they limit themselves to referring only what can no longer be concealed," Nuzzi writes.
It is interesting to note that Dardozzi's motive for turning whistleblower was not unalloyed disapproval of the IOR's unethical conduct. His decision to smuggle his secret archive out of the Vatican was motivated, at least in part, by anger at the institute's refusal to pay him a commission on the sale of a valuable real estate property near Florence. The unusual monsignor wanted to leave the money to his adoptive daughter, whose health condition required expensive hospital treatment.
Whatever the reason, Dardozzi's archive offers an unprecedented glimpse of the inner workings of one of the world's most secretive and unaccountable financial institutions. The idea that a noble end – winning the cold war or funding one's favourite charity – justifies almost any means, still seems to endure at the pope's bank in the Nicholas V Tower.
Philip Willan is the author of The Last Supper: The mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi. His website is www.philipwillan.com
----------
“The Vatican's Dirty Secrets: Bribery, Money Laundering and Mafia Connections”
Excerpt from http://www.alternet.org/story/140435/the_vatican%27s_dirty_secrets:_bribery,_money_laundering_and_mafia_connections/
The Vatican appears to have an enduring vocation for Italian political and financial scandal. Secrecy and intrigue were the order of the day when American archbishop Paul Marcinkus held sway in the Bastion of Nicholas V, the medieval tower housing the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), the Vatican's central bank.
The requirements of a clandestine global struggle against atheist communism may explain the choice of business partners such as Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, whose mafia links and ruinous bankruptcies brought lasting discredit on the Catholic church three decades ago.
The Vatican hoped that a goodwill payment of $240m to the creditors of Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano's would salve its conscience and erase the memory of Marcinkus's inept and dishonest banking practices. We were led to believe that a new broom, wielded by the lay banker Angelo Caloia, had since swept the premises of the IOR.
The process of reform has been slower and more painful than previously thought, however, to judge by a new book, Vaticano Spa ("Vatican Ltd"), by the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi. According to Nuzzi, despite the best efforts of Caloia, a cavalier attitude to financial ethics appears to have continued well into the 1990s, with huge political bribes being laundered through the IOR and funds donated for charitable purposes or to pay for masses for the souls of the dead being casually misappropriated by the bank's administrators.
Vatican gets huge donations from struggling Irish businessmen (but not towards Pope’s trip to Britain)
VATICAN CITY
National Secular Society (United Kingdom)
Irish builders and bankers who have reigned over a catastrophic virtual collapse in the country’s economy donated nearly €9m to the Vatican last year. Among those named as donors were property developers whose loans have been taken over by the state-run National Assets Management Agency (NAMA). Property developers Derek Quinlan, Treasury Holdings' Johnny Ronan, Ballymore Properties' Sean Mulryan and Paddy McKillen, one of the so called "Anglo 10" all made significant donations.
The Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums published recently reveals that these troubled property developers provided ‘financial support’ for the restoration of the historic Pauline Chapel in the Vatican Museum.
Fellow donors included former Anglo Irish bank chairman Sean FitzPatrick and the controversial former boss of Irish Nationwide Michael Fingleton. Other donors included Digicel owner Denis O’Brien and William Bollinger, the Irish co-founder of the €3bn Egerton Capital Hedge Fund.
In 2005, at the same time that Benedict XVI was hastily paving John Paul II’s speedy canonization, 7 of Europe’s most prominent theologians sent him a special letter proving John Paul II’s disqualifications for sainthood. These theologians were silenced see first article in our weblogs http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html.
John Paul II’s mishandling of the Vatican Bank was one of those reasons why he does not qualify to be a saint.
A investigative book has surfaced as a bestseller in Italy, Vatican Spa or Vatican Limited, and it cites John Paul II’s role in the corrupt Vatican Bank..
We post both articles for your perusal.
Benedict XVI is in a hurry to canonize John Paul II because it is a political strategy to revive the political clout of the papacy and the Vatican. It is up to us Catholics to prevent this from happening. We can see now, in hindsight, that John Paul II did not have the charity of Mother Teresa. He never “saw Christ” in anyone of the victims of the John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army which he led for over 26 years, the longest papacy (next to the martyr St. Peter). Mother Teresa “saw Christ” among the dying non-Christian Hindus of Calcutta. John Paul II traveled all over the world and he did not “see Christ”, not even once, among the Catholic children who were survivors pedophile priests. See John Paul II did not have the charity of Mother Teresa http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2009/11/john-paul-ii-did-not-have-charity-of.html
Comments from “The Vatican's Dirty Secrets: Bribery, Money Laundering and Mafia Connections”
---About the sanity of those who worship the pope dude as an infallible demigod. He parades around in a getup that's so expensive it would make Armani's best seem like something out of the Goodwill thrift store. The outrageous opulence of the churches themselves speaks of almost unlimited wealth. Then there's that palace at the Vatican. It makes the White House look like a tarpaper shack in comparison. I have to wonder how much better off the mostly dirt-poor subjects of this ongoing scam would be if the wealth of the church was evenly divided among them.
---Since the "birth" of "organized religion" it has been used to calm the masses and rip them off! These are the same people that heralded the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, and hide the priests from justice!
And yet they wonder why they are loosing credibility?!?!?! HELLO!
---It wouldn't be surprising when you consider the amount of collection plates needed to generate money to properly maintain that palatial estate in Rome.
Libro “Vaticano S.p.A.” di Gianluigi Nuzzi. Video
Le interviste del blog beppegrillo.it: Gianluigi Nuzzi Dal Blog di Beppe Grillo si riporta: Guarda, in dettaglio, il video sotto: L'Italia del dopoguerra si ...
vodpod.com/watch/1714348-vaticano-s-p-a-
http://www.encyclopedia.com/video/G2vqycZMtAU-vaticano-spa-intervista-allautore-gianluigi.aspx Video of author in the Vatican (in Italian)
by Gianluigi Nuzzi
Vatican's conspiracy of silence
ITALY
Guardian (United Kingdom)
Roberto Mancini guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 February 2010
Vaticano Spa (Vatican Ltd) a book about the murky financial dealings of the Catholic church (The subtitle reads: "from a secret archive – the truth about the church's financial and political scandals") has been a runaway success in Italy. Written by journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi and published by the Milan independent publisher Chiarelettere last year, more than 200,000 copies have been sold.
What's all the more astonishing is that this success has been in spite of being ignored by almost all the Italian media, with the exception of a single television programme on La 7, hosted by Gad Lerner.
Why the conspiracy of silence surrounding an Italian bestseller? Why aren't television, newspapers and magazines celebrating the success of a colleague? After all, Nuzzi has written for the Berlusconi family-owned weekly Panorama and now is a journalist for the daily Libero, considered to be the prime minister's house journal.
The explanation, according to Nuzzi, whom I asked for a comment for this article, lies in the subject matter:
"We thought that Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), as he had promised, would have sorted out the Vatican finances after the scandal of Cardinal Marcinkus and the IOR (the pope's bank).
"But during the 80s and 90s, the whole system of shady deals and bribes was inherited by Marcinkus's successors and became increasingly dishonest and cynical. The pope knew about it, but did nothing to remove the heads of this power network.
"The book, Vaticano Spa, steps inside the sacred palaces and uncovers secrets thanks to the huge archive bequeathed by monsignor Renato Dardozzi, who was summoned to join the 'perestroika' working on the Holy See's finances. My inquiry, which has the merit of not being anti-clerical, was considered the best selling non-fiction title in Italy for 2009 by the American Nielsen ratings.
"But, owing to some form of self-censorship, the television networks have ignored it, possibly because the church still inspires unconditional obsequiousness and fearful reverence. A lost opportunity because this is the first time that the most reserved documents from the pope's bank have been made available."
Aside from the desire not to offend the church, there are underlying political reasons that explain the reluctance of Berlusconi's private and the state-controlled public television channels to publicise this model of journalistic inquiry.
To summarise. For 20 years, until 2007, the CEI (the permanent Episcopal Conference of Italian Bishops) was ruled by cardinal Camillo Ruini, the vicar-general of the diocese of Rome. In Ruini's view, the church should be a pro-Berlusconi political party and he sought out and created ties both with the Northern League with its pantomime paganism and with the so-called "pious atheists" – ie, some of Berlusconi's most fervent supporters in the press. The most influential among these are Giuliano Ferrara, the founder and editor of Il Foglio (which belongs to Veronica Lario, the soon-to-be-divorced Mrs Berlusconi) and Vittorio Feltri, the editor-in-chief of Il Giornale (which belongs to Berlusconi's brother).
Ruini's successor, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, believed his predecessor was too openly favourable towards centre-right extremists. Furthermore, Berlusconi's involvement in endless sex scandals and his unbridled lifestyle had become a source of embarrassment to the church. As a result, Bertone encouraged Avvenire, the CEI's daily paper to distance itself from Berlusconi's hedonism, scandals and pending legal problems.
Alarmed that the church was considering an alliance with a future PDL (Berlusconi's party) but excluding Berlusconi himself, the "pious atheists" – the prime minister's National Guards – rode to the rescue.
Vittorio Feltri wrote a front page editorial in his newspaper demanding (and obtaining) the resignation of the editor of l'Avvenire, Dino Boffo. Boffo was accused of hypocrisy for daring to criticise Berlusconi's lifestyle while he himself had been involved in a case of homosexual harassment. The accusation proved false, but Feltri raised the stakes by insinuating he had been informed of the forged document against Boffo by a Vatican source. The mysterious informer was apparently someone in the entourage of Giovanni Maria Vian, the very powerful editor-in-chief of the Vatican daily paper, l'Osservatore Romano.
Against such a background, Nuzzi's outstanding investigation and its astonishing revelations (such as secret accounts registered to charities for research into leukaemia but used to protect high-profile clients) have become a pawn in the gang war in the Curia which Berlusconi's most fanatical supporters have every interest in exacerbating.
Meanwhile the church's unlawful activities, as revealed by the book, seem neither to bother nor to scandalise many people in Italy, perhaps because since the days of Luther, Italian cynics know that the church is an organ of power and that it has little to do with religious sentiment.
• Translated from Italian by Judy Segor
--------------
How the Vatican sold its soul
A new book by the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi lays bare a history of political bribes being paid through the Vatican's central bank
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/03/vatican-central-bank
Excertps
• Comments (45)
• Philip Willan
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 June 2009 20.00 BST
The Vatican appears to have an enduring vocation for Italian political and financial scandal. Secrecy and intrigue were the order of the day when American archbishop Paul Marcinkus held sway in the Bastion of Nicholas V, the medieval tower housing the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), the Vatican's central bank.
The requirements of a clandestine global struggle against atheist communism may explain the choice of business partners such as Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, whose mafia links and ruinous bankruptcies brought lasting discredit on the Catholic church three decades ago.
The Vatican hoped that a goodwill payment of $240m to the creditors of Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano's would salve its conscience and erase the memory of Marcinkus's inept and dishonest banking practices. We were led to believe that a new broom, wielded by the lay banker Angelo Caloia, had since swept the premises of the IOR.
The process of reform has been slower and more painful than previously thought, however, to judge by a new book, Vaticano Spa ("Vatican Ltd"), by the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi. According to Nuzzi, despite the best efforts of Caloia, a cavalier attitude to financial ethics appears to have continued well into the 1990s, with huge political bribes being laundered through the IOR and funds donated for charitable purposes or to pay for masses for the souls of the dead being casually misappropriated by the bank's administrators.
Nuzzi's allegations are based on internal IOR documents, more than 4,000 in all, that were smuggled out of the Vatican by a disgruntled employee. This unique violation of IOR confidentiality was made possible by an unlikely whistleblower, Monsignor Renato Dardozzi. An electronic engineer who held a top job at the state telecommunications company, Dardozzi discovered his vocation late in life and was ordained a priest at the age of 52.
He worked in the IOR under Marcinkus, participated in the joint Vatican/Italian commission that examined the IOR's role in the Ambrosiano saga, and witnessed Caloia's uphill struggle against the personnel and practices of the Marcinkus era.
Monsignor Donato De Bonis, who served as secretary general under Marcinkus, continued to work under the new regime.
In 1987, according to Nuzzi, De Bonis set up the Cardinal Francis Spellman Foundation, with its own account at the IOR. Signatories on the account included De Bonis himself. During its first six years of operation the account received some 50bn lire (£22m) and paid out 43bn.
The choice of the staunchly anti-communist Spellman as "patron" of the fund is interesting. The well-connected cardinal of New York earned the sobriquet "money-bags" for his fund-raising skills and earmarked significant sums for Italy's Christian Democrat party during the cold war years.
The Spellman fund seems to have been administered by De Bonis with promiscuous generosity. A variety of convents and clerics were to benefit, with payments ranging from the modest 1m lire paid to five mother superiors, to the $50,000 sent to the auxiliary bishop of Skopje-Prizen, for the Albanian-speaking faithful, and the $1m delivered to Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves, the archbishop of Sao Salvador de Bahia in Brazil.
There were also payments of a more personal nature: 100m lire for one of the lawyers of Giulio Andreotti, the veteran Christian Democrat politician, $134,000 for a conference on Cicero in New York sponsored by the former prime minister, and even a 60m lire payment to Severino Citaristi, a former treasurer of the Christian Democrat party convicted on corruption charges.
Part of the massive Enimont bribe, paid to politicians to secure their approval for a reorganisation of the chemicals sector, was also bounced through the Spellman fund, according to Nuzzi. But Caloia and Dardozzi chose discretion over transparency when questioned about it by prosecutors from Milan. "Despite the full collaboration promised and publicised in the press, they limit themselves to referring only what can no longer be concealed," Nuzzi writes.
It is interesting to note that Dardozzi's motive for turning whistleblower was not unalloyed disapproval of the IOR's unethical conduct. His decision to smuggle his secret archive out of the Vatican was motivated, at least in part, by anger at the institute's refusal to pay him a commission on the sale of a valuable real estate property near Florence. The unusual monsignor wanted to leave the money to his adoptive daughter, whose health condition required expensive hospital treatment.
Whatever the reason, Dardozzi's archive offers an unprecedented glimpse of the inner workings of one of the world's most secretive and unaccountable financial institutions. The idea that a noble end – winning the cold war or funding one's favourite charity – justifies almost any means, still seems to endure at the pope's bank in the Nicholas V Tower.
Philip Willan is the author of The Last Supper: The mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi. His website is www.philipwillan.com
----------
“The Vatican's Dirty Secrets: Bribery, Money Laundering and Mafia Connections”
Excerpt from http://www.alternet.org/story/140435/the_vatican%27s_dirty_secrets:_bribery,_money_laundering_and_mafia_connections/
The Vatican appears to have an enduring vocation for Italian political and financial scandal. Secrecy and intrigue were the order of the day when American archbishop Paul Marcinkus held sway in the Bastion of Nicholas V, the medieval tower housing the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), the Vatican's central bank.
The requirements of a clandestine global struggle against atheist communism may explain the choice of business partners such as Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, whose mafia links and ruinous bankruptcies brought lasting discredit on the Catholic church three decades ago.
The Vatican hoped that a goodwill payment of $240m to the creditors of Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano's would salve its conscience and erase the memory of Marcinkus's inept and dishonest banking practices. We were led to believe that a new broom, wielded by the lay banker Angelo Caloia, had since swept the premises of the IOR.
The process of reform has been slower and more painful than previously thought, however, to judge by a new book, Vaticano Spa ("Vatican Ltd"), by the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi. According to Nuzzi, despite the best efforts of Caloia, a cavalier attitude to financial ethics appears to have continued well into the 1990s, with huge political bribes being laundered through the IOR and funds donated for charitable purposes or to pay for masses for the souls of the dead being casually misappropriated by the bank's administrators.
Vatican gets huge donations from struggling Irish businessmen (but not towards Pope’s trip to Britain)
VATICAN CITY
National Secular Society (United Kingdom)
Irish builders and bankers who have reigned over a catastrophic virtual collapse in the country’s economy donated nearly €9m to the Vatican last year. Among those named as donors were property developers whose loans have been taken over by the state-run National Assets Management Agency (NAMA). Property developers Derek Quinlan, Treasury Holdings' Johnny Ronan, Ballymore Properties' Sean Mulryan and Paddy McKillen, one of the so called "Anglo 10" all made significant donations.
The Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums published recently reveals that these troubled property developers provided ‘financial support’ for the restoration of the historic Pauline Chapel in the Vatican Museum.
Fellow donors included former Anglo Irish bank chairman Sean FitzPatrick and the controversial former boss of Irish Nationwide Michael Fingleton. Other donors included Digicel owner Denis O’Brien and William Bollinger, the Irish co-founder of the €3bn Egerton Capital Hedge Fund.
posted by Paris Arrow | Saturday, March 06, 2010
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