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Vatican Bank Chief’s Free-Market Ideology and Opus Dei Background

Com­ment: Ettore Got­ti Tedeschi–head of the Vat­i­can Bank [1]–espoused the free-mar­ket ide­ol­o­gy [2] that led to the crash of 2008. Tedeschi has also advised then Car­di­nal Ratzinger [3] and helped him write an eco­nom­ic the­sis. (Ratzinger became, of course, Pope Bene­dict.) Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Tedeschi  is a mem­ber of Opus Dei, the fas­cist lay Catholic order that has been ascen­dant in Vat­i­can pol­i­tics.

Once again, the Vat­i­can Bank has come under inves­ti­ga­tion [4] for mon­ey laun­der­ing. As not­ed in past posts, the lawyer cur­rent­ly assist­ing the Vat­i­can in cas­es relat­ed to child molesta­tion had pre­vi­ous­ly defend­ed the Vat­i­can Bank [5] in a Holo­caust-relat­ed law­suit.

A pri­ma­ry investor in Nazi indus­try [6], the Vat­i­can Bank has long been involved with financ­ing fas­cism.

“Pope’s Banker Faces Inquiry over ‘Mon­ey Laun­der­ing’ ” by Michael Day; independent.co.uk; 9/22/2010. [7]

Excerpt: The Vat­i­can, still pick­ing up the pieces after the glob­al pae­dophil­ia scan­dal, was yes­ter­day rocked by news that the heads of its bank are under inves­ti­ga­tion in con­nec­tion with a £20m mon­ey laun­der­ing probe.

Vat­i­can Bank pres­i­dent Ettore Got­ti Tedeschi and direc­tor-gen­er­al Pao­lo Cipri­ani are being inves­ti­gat­ed fol­low­ing two trans­ac­tions that were report­ed as “sus­pi­cious”, police sources said.

The trans­ac­tions on 15 Sep­tem­ber are thought to involve €20m sent to the Ger­man bank JP Mor­gan in Frank­furt, and €3m sent to a cen­tral-Ital­ian bank, the Ban­ca del Fuci­no. The funds have been seized by Ital­ian author­i­ties. . . .

Mr Got­ti Tedeschi is a mem­ber of the ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gious move­ment Opus Dei, and an out­spo­ken advo­cate of the need for greater moral­i­ty in finance. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.] . . .

Yes­ter­day’s rev­e­la­tions, which come just days after Pope Bene­dict com­plet­ed his con­tro­ver­sial tour of Britain, are only the lat­est in a series of inci­dents that have raised doubts about the finan­cial integri­ty of the bank, how­ev­er. . . .

The Vat­i­can Bank, after a series of scan­dals stretch­ing back to the fraud­u­lent bank­rupt­cy of Ban­co Ambrosiano in the 1980s, is under pres­sure to adopt new finan­cial stan­dards fol­low­ing a 2009 push by the G20 nations for greater trans­paren­cy.

The IOR said it been work­ing “for some time” with the Bank of Italy and the Organ­i­sa­tion for Eco­nom­ic Coop­er­a­tion and Devel­op­ment “for the Holy See’s inclu­sion in the so-called White List” – an OECD des­ig­na­tion for coun­tries that apply inter­na­tion­al tax reg­u­la­tions. The Bank of Italy has declared that trans­ac­tions with banks such as the IOR, which are not on the White List, will be sub­ject to greater scruti­ny. . . .