Vatican prosecutors have indicted Angelo
Caloia and his lawyer over embezzlement losses
of more than $60 million.
New recruits of the Vatican’s elite Swiss Guard march in front of the tower of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) during the swearing-in ceremony at the Vatican May 6, 2014.
VATICAN CITY - A former
president of the Vatican Bank has been
ordered to stand trial on charges of
embezzlement and money laundering, the
Vatican said, the highest ranking Holy See
financial official to be indicted.
A statement by the bank, officially known as
the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), said
the former president’s legal counsel was also
indicted.
The two are Angelo Caloia, 78, who was
president of the IOR from 1999 and 2009, and
lawyer Gabriele Liuzzo, 94. A third person who
was originally under investigation, former IOR
director general Lelio Scaletti, died several
years ago.
Caloia and Liuzzo have both repeatedly denied
wrongdoing. They were not immediately
available for comment on Friday.
The bank said “unlawful conduct” by the three
was carried out between 2001 and 2008 during
“the disposal of a considerable part of the
institute’s real estate assets.”
It said damages had been estimated to be more
than 50 million euro, or about $61 million, and
that the IOR would be seeking compensation for
damages. The trial is due to start on March 15.
PIER MARCO TACCA/GETTY IMAGES
Angelo Caloia, former president of the Vatican Bank, pictured in December 2011 in Milan, Italy.
It was reported exclusively in December 2014
that the Vatican’s top prosecutor, Gian Piero
Milano, had frozen millions of dollars in
accounts held by the three men.
They were suspected of embezzling money while
managing the sale of 29 buildings sold by the
Vatican bank to mainly Italian buyers between
2001 and 2008, according to a copy of the
freezing order reviewed by sources at the time.
In the freezing order, Milano said the men
regularly under-represented the proceeds from
real estate sales in the Vatican bank’s official
books. The men allegedly received the difference
between the real sale prices and the amount
officially recorded separately and often in cash,
according to the order.
Some of the proceeds were deposited in a Rome
bank account that was not registered on the
IOR’s balance sheet, the prosecutor said.
The bank’s internal investigation into the
alleged scam begun in 2013 by then-president
Ernst von Freyberg, a German businessman.
Freyberg commissioned an independent audit of
the sale of properties that had been owned by
the bank after noting suspicious accounting
procedures under previous administrations.
Feyberg, who was president until 2014, began
an overhaul of the bank, which for decades was
embroiled in numerous financial scandals.
Thousands of accounts were closed and last
year Italy put the Vatican on its “white list” of
states with cooperative financial institutions,
ending years of mistrust and providing an
endorsement of efforts by Pope Francis to
clean up finances.
Moneyval, the monitoring body of the Council of
Europe, has said in several evaluations that
while the Vatican has made great strides in
cleaning up the IOR and other financial
departments, it needed to be much more
aggressive in bringing cases to trial.
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