Aboard the ANA plane, Pope Francis spoke about the Fiscal scandals faced by the Vatican Accounts Department. This comes ahead of the need to submit the audit reports to Moneyval, the international body dealing with the accounts and audits of the Vatican’s finance department.
Although investigators are looking into a controversial Vatican investment in a luxury London property development, whether the deal was corrupt is still an open question, Pope Francis said Tuesday. Answering questions aboard the papal plane from Tokyo to Rome on November 26, the pope said that investing funds from Peter’s Pence is an acceptable form of financial management if the investments are solid.
The pope also said Vatican’s financial reforms are working well, and he is happy the Vatican prosecutor, called the Promoter of Justice, had filed reports about some instances of corruption inside the Vatican. While acknowledging ongoing investigations in several cases, the pope did not weigh in on the London property investment, saying it is “not yet clear.”
The pope discussed Vatican financial scandal and reform in response to a question related to the Secretariat of State’s investment of some $200 million in a London property development at 60 Sloane Avenue in Chelsea. CNA has reported that the investment was financed by a short-term loan package secured by the Secretariat of State through Swiss banks, with part of the funding coming from BSI, a bank later closed by Swiss financial authorities for systematically failing to act against suspected money-laundering activities by sovereign wealth funds.
The pope explained that good management of Peter’s Pence, the papal fund supported by annual donation appeals in Catholic parishes around the world, often includes investments and that this is a more prudent use of resources than keeping them in a “drawer.”
Pope Francis said he believes questioning of the five suspended employees will begin within a month or two, and stressed the importance of the presumption of innocence. “It’s a bad thing, it’s not good what is happening in the Vatican. But it was clear that the internal mechanisms are beginning to work, those which Benedict XVI had already begun to make,” he said. “And I thank God. I do not thank God there is corruption, but I thank God that the Vatican monitoring system is working well.”
