– Insider trading –
“In a process like this you always set a low threshold for reporting to create awareness. I hope in 2016 the figure will be back to normal. Of course ideally we would like a zero figure but that is not realistic.”
The 544 suspect transactions resulted in 17 reports being handed over to Vatican prosecutors, including at least one which included evidence of insider training on a major stock market.
Prosecutors believe Calvi’s 1982 death was linked to money laundering via the Vatican bank.
It emerged nearly 30 years later that the Vatican still had no idea of the identity of thousands of IOR account holders and that some accounts were held by people with no apparent connection to the Church or its charitable works.
Others contained secret slush funds used for off-the-books spending by Vatican departments, according to books published recently by two Italian journalists, who are now on trial for conspiring in the leak of classified documents.
Vatican efforts to put its finances in order initially accelerated after Pope Francis’s election in 2013. But an economic reform commission he established has since been disbanded and three of its members are currently on trial with the journalists.
Moves to have all the Vatican books externally audited have also been a start-stop affair.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) were appointed in December to do the job by powerful Australian cardinal George Pell, the head of the Vatican’s economic secretariat.
But PwC’s $3-million contract was suspended last week on the orders of a rival department, the secretariat of state, leaving Pell “a little surprised.”
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