The Bullet!

According to this article .. Pope B-XVI was forced out by Bank of Italy... for mismanagement it sounds... So it hid money??


BUSINESS BRIEFING Holy See finds unknown millions: 
‘Days of ripping off the Vatican are over’ 
  MICHAEL BABAD The Globe and Mail Published Friday, Dec. 05 2014, 7:35 AM EST Last updated Friday, Dec. 05 2014, 11:44 AM EST 

 Money trail The Vatican isn’t “broke.”

In fact, the Holy See’s economic chief says, it’s in better shape than believed, having found “some hundreds millions of euros” stashed away in certain accounts.

 “Apart from the pension fund, which needs to be strengthened for the demands on it in 15 or 20 years, the Holy See is paying its way, while possessing substantial assets and investments,” Cardinal George Pell, prefect of the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy, writes in Britain’s Catholic Herald.

 “In fact, we have discovered that the situation is much healthier than it seemed, because some hundreds of millions of euros were tucked away in particular sectional accounts and did not appear on the balance sheet,” he adds. “It is another question, impossible to answer, whether the Vatican should have much larger reserves.”

 The Vatican has been plagued by scandal when it comes to finances, and has moved aggressively to clean up its act. With this latest article – titled “The days of ripping off the Vatican are over” – it is becoming even more transparent.

 The article cites the scandals at Vatican bank in the early 1980s, and then the more demands that it meet global money-laundering laws. It also notes that those in charge of the bank “did not move swiftly enough,” prompting the Bank of Italy to freeze millions of its funds and other banks to shun its business. “It was a grave situation where the worst was narrowly averted,” the cardinal says.

 The Vatican then moved to clean things up, striking a Financial Information Authority to deal with money laundering, among other things.

 “In the pre-conclave meetings before the election of Pope Francis there was an almost unanimous consensus among the cardinals that the curial and banking worlds in the Vatican needed to be reformed and normalized,” he adds.

 “When Pope Francis realized that the Vatican financial systems had evolved in such a way that was impossible for anyone to know accurately what was going on over all, he appointed an international body of lay experts to examine the situation and propose a reform program.” That was done, leading to new principles for the Holy See – adoption of modern financial standards, transparency and a separation of powers – and then the Secretariat was formed.

 Next up under the progressive Pope Francis are the appointment of an auditor-general, and investments controlled by the Vatican Asset Management, for whom “prudence will be the first priority, rather than risky high returns, in order to avoid excessive losses in times of turbulence.”