Vatican Banksta Tedeschi

Activist Post

Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the president of Vatican’s bank Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), reportedly resigned Thursday after a vote of no confidence by the bank’s board.

No details were given other than that Tedeschi “failed to meet some highly important functions” and that he was removed for “for dereliction of duty.”

Tedeschi was tapped to run the bank in 2003 about twenty years after its involvement in one of Italy’s largest banking fraud cases in history.

Shrouded in murder and mystery, the Vatican was implicated in the $3.5 billion collapse of Banco Ambrosiano in the 1980s following the disappearance of $1.3 billion to several dummy companies in Latin America.

Although the Vatican denied any wrongdoing, they did acknowledge “moral involvement” and paid a settlement of nearly $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors.

More recently under Tedeschi’s reign, the bank’s reputation has been trashed by a string of scandals over the past few years. In 2010, the IOR became the prime target in a fraud investigation over charges of money laundering.

The Vatican banking fraud investigation cited suspicious transactions involving checks drawn with a fake name from a Vatican bank account at Unicredit bank in 2009.

The Associated Press reported that prosecutors also cited “euro 650,000 withdrawal from a Vatican bank account at Intesa San Paolo bank where the Vatican didn’t specify the money’s ultimate destination despite a specific request by the Italian bank.”

Prosecutors said the Vatican bank’s actions were “a deliberate failure to observe the anti-laundering laws with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital.”

As a result, the U.S. State Department put the Vatican on a list of countries it considers vulnerable to money laundering, and JP Morgan closed the Vatican bank accounts.

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