Profits at the Vatican bank
took an enormous leap in 2014 over the previous year, rising to
69.3 million euros compared with just under three million euros
in 2013, the institution announced Monday.
"The improvement was mainly due to the performance of the
results from trading securities and the decrease in operating
costs of an extraordinary nature," according to the annual
report of the Bank, whose official name is the Institute for the
Works of Religion (IOR).
Net income from trading activity last year was 36.7 million
euros compred with the net loss of 16.5 million euro in 2013,
said the bank.
The bank, once racked by scandals, has been undergoing
drastic reforms as it cleans up its accounts and in 2014, worked
to trim operating expenses "of an extraordinary nature".
Those involved costs in 2013 related to bringing in experts
to help the IOR to meet international standards in fighting
money-laundering.
The bank has also been reviewing its client base and Monday
announced it closed 2,600 inactive accounts between May 2013 and
December 31, 2014.
A further 554 accounts were closed because they were not
considered to fit with the IOR's profile of appropriate clients.
As well, another 1,460 accounts had been closed because
they reached their natural termination, while 274 more were in
the process of being shut down.
The IOR has been closing down the accounts of people who
are not clergy or Holy See employees to reduce the potential for
the bank to be used for financial crime.
The IOR added Monday that it had 15,181 clients at the end
of 2014 and ended last year with a net profit of 69.3 million
euros, up from 2.9 million in 2013.
Bank President Jean-Baptiste de Franssu said that the IOR
has shown "great commitment in dealing with offenses that in
past have affected the Institute".
Soon after he was elected in 2013, Pope Francis created a
commission to oversee the troubled financial institution in an
effort to make it more ethical and transparent.
IOR has had a chequered history, including probes of
behaviour by some past managers.
Italian banks effectively stopped dealing with the IOR in
2010 after the Bank of Italy ordered them to enforce strict
anti-money-laundering criteria to continue working with it.
And for about six weeks in early 2013, the Bank of Italy
froze all credit-card and ATM transactions inside the Vatican
City over its failure to fully implement international
anti-money-laundering standards.
The Vatican has made several reforms to introduce greater
financial transparency and fight money laundering under Pope
Francis.
He nominated a pontifical commission to make proposals on
the future of the bank and he has even openly expressed the
possibility of abolishing it.
The bank's problems go back many years.
There have been many allegations that the IOR was used to
launder money, most notably by 'God's Banker' Roberto Calvi, the
former head of Italy's biggest private bank, whose body was
found hanging under Blackfriar's Bridge in London in 1982, a
suspected victim of the Sicilian mafia.
The IOR was also named in kickbacks probes stemming from
the 1990 collapse of public-private chemicals colossus Enimont,
part of the Clean Hands investigations that swept away Italy's
old political establishment.
In recent years there has been a series of Italian TV
reports and a best-selling book claiming to show how individuals
used the IOR to squirrel away money, dodging Italian
regulations.
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