Thursday, June 14, 2012

Vatican bank's former president accused of negligence

Ettore Gotti TedeschiThe ousted head of the Vatican bank came under a withering counter-attack at the weekend as his former top official accused him of negligence and leaked documents were published casting doubt on his mental health.

The Vatican meanwhile warned Italian prosecutors against using information in papers seized last week from the bank's ex-president, saying it may be covered by the Holy See's "sovereign prerogatives".

Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who was appointed by Pope Benedict to bring the Vatican into line with international regulations on money laundering, was dismissed last month from the presidency of the bank, known as the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR).

The financier was last week reported to have prepared a series of dossiers to be sent to named individuals in the event of his sudden death. 

According to an Italian prosecutor, Gotti Tedeschi has said his problems at the bank started after he demanded to see "information about accounts that were not in the church's name".

But his former general manager, Paolo Cipriani, said in an interview published on Sunday that there were no numbered accounts at the Vatican bank and the only Italians, apart from priests, monks and nuns, who banked with the IOR were lay employees or pensioners of the Holy See. The former president had been invited to inspect lists of accounts. "We repeatedly asked the president to interest himself in the institute, but he didn't take things in hand. It was as if he were absent, even when he was present," Cipriani said.

Aspersions were also cast on the ousted banker by a psychotherapist who advises the IOR on the welfare of its employees. After observing Gotti Tedeschi's behaviour at last year's Vatican bank Christmas party, Dr Pietro La Salvia wrote a report – published in the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano – which the paper said was handed to Benedict's right-hand man, secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

The report said that the banker displayed "traits of egocentricity, narcissism and a partial disconnection from reality that could be a psychopathological dysfunction". Gotti Tedeschi, aged 67, has held a string of senior appointments in Italian banking and currently runs the Italian unit of the Spanish bank Banco Santander.

Other documents leaked to Il Fatto Quotidiano gave a new insight into the venomous behind-the-scenes divisions at IOR. One was a letter from a member of the bank's four-man lay oversight board, who wrote to Bertone at about the time the cardinal was said to have received La Salvia's complaints of Gotti Tedeschi's "increasingly eccentric behaviour".

Carl Anderson, the head of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic lay fellowship, said: "His occasional communications with me are focused not on the life of the institute but on internal political manoeuvring and on denigrating others."

The vice-president of the board, Ronaldo Schmitz, a former executive director of Deutsche Bank, also wrote to the secretary of state just before the meeting at which Gotti Tedeschi was fired to say that he would resign if the then president were not removed. 

Until now, speculation over the reason for his dismissal has centred on known differences over the Holy See's new anti-money laundering measures.

An independent watchdog was set up in 2010, but its charter was changed, prompting claims that some in the Vatican were less than keen on full transparency.

The issue of accounts belonging to outsiders has added a new twist to the story. But Cipriani told Corriere della Sera: "There are no secrets [and] no mystery.