A senior Vatican cleric has been arrested along with a member of Italy’s secret services and a financial broker on suspicion of plotting to smuggle 20 million euros (US$26 million) into the country illegally from Switzerland.
Nunzio Scarano, a prelate from Salerno in southern Italy, reportedly known as “monsignor 500” for his fondness for high- denomination euro notes, was arrested in Rome on suspicion of corruption and slander for his alleged part in an aborted plan to bring back millions of euros to Italy in July last year on behalf of some friends.
Despite the fact that prosecutors do not believe the Vatican bank was directly linked to the alleged plot, the arrests, which stem from a wider investigation into the secretive bank, are likely to bring fresh embarrassment for the Vatican in the era of a pontiff who has said he wants “a poor church” and ethical finance.
In the alleged plot, prosecutor Nello Rossi told reporters that the prelate had approached Giovanni Zito, an agent with the Italian secret services, to ask him whether he could help facilitate an “intricately planned” scheme to return the money on board a private plane from Locarno without having to pass customs.
The money had been given to Giovanni Carenzio, a Swiss-based broker, to invest, and between them the three planned to bring back 40 million euros to Italy, a figure later reduced to 20 million euros, Rossi said.
The plan was not carried out, due to disagreements among the three, Rossi added.
Scarano’s lawyer, Silverio Sica, said his client had just been a middleman trying to help his friends.
Until recently, Scarano was employed as an accountant in the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, a unit inside the Vatican that deals with property owned by the Holy See and is separate from the Vatican bank, known officially as the Institute for Religious Works (IOR). When, more than a month ago, they were told the cleric was under investigation by prosecutors in his native Salerno looking into separate allegations of money laundering, his superiors suspended him, the Vatican’s spokesman Federico Lombardi said.
Scarano, who is in his early 60s, was being investigated on suspicion of using 560,000 euros of donations in a personal IOR account to pay off his personal mortgage in Italy. To do so he allegedly asked 56 friends to accept 10,000 euros each in return for a cheque to an Italian bank account.
The funds had been intended for a home for the terminally ill.
Sica has said Scarano only took the money “temporarily” and had intended to use the proceeds of the property sale to pay it back.
In an interview, Scarano denied having ever stolen or laundered money.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS