Saturday, June 9, 2012

Gotti Tedeschi, Vatican Banker, is a Dead Man Walking? – Institute for Religious Works

Blackfriars Bridge London.  Where all Vatican Bankers eventually go.

If history repeats itself, and it is likely to, the lay man outsider Gotti Tedeschi, former head of the Vatican Bank is an apparent dead man, doomsday dossier or not.

His leaving his sacking meeting at the Vatican Bank before it was finished no doubt gave him a few minutes to escape the Vatican before being arrested by the Swiss Guards.  He is no doubt just another scapegoat for all the corruption at the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), same as Roberto Calvi before him.  Cardinals don’t commit crimes, money launder or go to jail for money laundering. Pity.

The IOR was founded in 1942 by Pius XII to sort through and make profit from all the Nazi gold being funneled through the Vatican Bank from all over Europe, money laundering, before being presented to the rest of the world as legitimate funds through "religious works".
From the Internet 2010:
Vatican City – This is no ordinary bank: The ATMs are in Latin. Priests use a private entrance. A life-size portrait of Pope Benedict XVI hangs on the wall. 
Nevertheless, the Institute for Religious Works is a bank, and it’s under harsh new scrutiny in a case involving money-laundering allegations that led police to seize euro23 million ($30 million) in Vatican assets in September. Critics say the case shows that the “Vatican Bank” has never shed its penchant for secrecy and scandal. 
The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a “misunderstanding” and expresses optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws “with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital.” The documents also reveal investigators’ suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia. 
The documents pinpoint two transactions that have not been reported: one in 2009 involving the use of a false name, and another in 2010 in which the Vatican Bank withdrew euro650,000 ($860,000) from an Italian bank account but ignored bank requests to disclose where the money was headed. 
The new allegations of financial impropriety could not come at a worse time for the Vatican, already hit by revelations that it sheltered pedophile priests. The corruption probe has given new hope to Holocaust survivors who tried unsuccessfully to sue in the United States, alleging that Nazi loot was stored in the Vatican Bank. 
Yet the scandal is hardly the first for the centuries-old bank. In 1986, a Vatican financial adviser died after drinking cyanide-laced coffee in prison. Another was found dangling from a rope under London’s Blackfriars Bridge in 1982, his pockets stuffed with money and stones. The incidents blackened the bank’s reputation, raised suspicions of ties with the Mafia, and cost the Vatican hundreds of millions of dollars in legal clashes with Italian authorities. 
On Sept. 21, financial police seized assets from a Vatican Bank account at the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano SpA. Investigators said the Vatican had failed to furnish information on the origin or destination of the funds as required by Italian law.
The bulk of the money, euro20 million ($26 million), was destined for JP Morgan in Frankfurt, with the remainder going to Banca del Fucino. 
Prosecutors alleged the Vatican ignored regulations that foreign banks must communicate to Italian financial authorities where their money has come from. All banks have declined to comment. 
In another case, financial police in Sicily said in late October that they uncovered money laundering involving the use of a Vatican Bank account by a priest in Rome whose uncle was convicted of Mafia association. 
Authorities say some euro250,000 euros, illegally obtained from the regional government of Sicily for a fish breeding company, was sent to the priest by his father as a “charitable donation,” then sent back to Sicily from a Vatican Bank account using a series of home banking operations to make it difficult to trace. 
The prosecutors’ office stated in court papers last month that while the bank has expressed a “generic and stated will” to conform to international standards, “there is no sign that the institutions of the Catholic church are moving in that direction.” It said its investigation had found “exactly the opposite.” 
Legal waters are murky because of the Vatican’s special status as an independent state within Italy. This time, Italian investigators were able to move against the Vatican Bank because the Bank of Italy classifies it as a foreign financial institution operating in Italy. However, in one of the 1980s scandals, prosecutors could not arrest then-bank head Paul Marcinkus, an American archbishop, because Italy’s highest court ruled he had immunity. 
Marcinkus, who died in 2006 and always proclaimed his innocence, was the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s character Archbishop Gilday in Godfather III.
The Vatican has pledged to comply with EU financial standards and create a watchdog authority. Gianluigi Nuzzi, author of “Vatican SpA,” a 2009 book outlining the bank’s shady dealings, said it’s possible the Vatican is serious about coming clean, but he isn’t optimistic. 
“I don’t trust them,” he said. “After the previous big scandals, they said ‘we’ll change’ and they didn’t. It’s happened too many times.” 
He said the structure and culture of the institution is such that powerful account-holders can exert pressure on management, and some managers are simply resistant to change. 
The list of account-holders is secret, though bank officials say there are some 40,000-45,000 among religious congregations, clergy, Vatican officials and lay people with Vatican connections. 
The bank chairman is Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, also chairman of Banco Santander’s Italian operations, who was brought in last year to bring the Vatican Bank in line with Italian and international regulations. Gotti Tedeschi has been on a very public speaking tour extolling the benefits of a morality-based financial system. 
“He went to sell the new image … not knowing that inside, the same things were still happening,” Nuzzi said. “They continued to do these transfers without the names, not necessarily in bad faith, but out of habit.” 
It doesn’t help that Gotti Tedeschi himself and the bank’s No. 2 official, Paolo Cipriani, are under investigation for alleged violations of money-laundering laws. They were both questioned by Rome prosecutors on Sept. 30, although no charges have been filed. 
In his testimony, Gotti Tedeschi said he knew next to nothing about the bank’s day-to-day operations, noting that he had been on the job less than a year and only works at the bank two full days a week. 
According to the prosecutors’ interrogation transcripts obtained by AP, Gotti Tedeschi deflected most questions about the suspect transactions to Cipriani. Cipriani in turn said that when the Holy See transferred money without identifying the sender, it was the Vatican’s own money, not a client’s. 
Gotti Tedeschi declined a request for an interview but said by e-mail that he questioned the motivations of prosecutors. In a speech in October, he described a wider plot against the church, decrying “personal attacks on the pope, the facts linked to pedophilia (that) still continue now with the issues that have seen myself involved.” 
As the Vatican proclaims its innocence, the courts are holding firm. An Italian court has rejected a Vatican appeal to lift the order to seize assets. 
The Vatican Bank was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII to manage assets destined for religious or charitable works. The bank, located in the tower of Niccolo V, is not open to the public, but people who use it described the layout to the AP. 
Top prelates have a special entrance manned by security guards. There are about 100 staffers, 10 bank windows, a basement vault for safe deposit boxes, and ATMs that open in Latin but can be accessed in modern languages. In another concession to modern times, the bank recently began issuing credit cards. 
In the scandals two decades ago, Sicilian financier Michele Sindona was appointed by the pope to manage the Vatican’s foreign investments. He also brought in Roberto Calvi, a Catholic banker in northern Italy.
Sindona’s banking empire collapsed in the mid-1970s and his links to the mob were exposed, sending him to prison and his eventual death from poisoned coffee. Calvi then inherited his role. 
Calvi headed the Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982 after the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans made to dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans. 
Calvi was found a short time later hanging from scaffolding on Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets loaded with 11 pounds of bricks and $11,700 in various currencies. After an initial ruling of suicide, murder charges were filed against five people, including a major Mafia figure, but all were acquitted after trial. 
While denying wrongdoing, the Vatican Bank paid $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors.
Both the Calvi and Sindona cases remain unsolved.
 Source: Associated Press, December 2010


Follow the money.

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ODESSA Nazi Connection to the Vatican Bank? – Financing the Fourth Reich?



This Vatican banking scandal has too many loose ends. Former President of the Vatican Bank Gotti Tedeschi has compiled a doomsday dossier in case his body gets found mysteriously hanging from a bridge in London.

Banco Ambrosiano, a Vatican as stock holder controlled bank, went belly up in 1982 made $1.5 billion in phony loans and or legitimate loans to dummy corporations in South America. "God's Banker" Roberto Calvi, President of Banco Ambrosiano, his body was found hanging from the Blackfriars Bridge in London shortly thereafter.  

In the present scandal and coverup of money laundering and corruption in the Vatican Bank, the Vice President Ronaldo Schmitz of the Vatican Bank wanted Tedeschi out.  Ronaldo Schmitz claims to have been born in Brazil.  What did it cost his parents to forge those documents?  Etc. Like the priests and nuns, working under unofficial orders of Pius XII, that forged Vatican visas or issued outright legitimate ones for SS Nazi officers to escape to South America, could not like forge a Brazilian birth certificate as well?

I smell a rat, like the O.D.E.S.S.A. possibly operating here with the Vatican bank in the middle of a second generation of Nazis trying to establish the Fourth Reich with the help of Benedict XVI?  Gotta pay back the players that put that tiara on your head? Right Joe?

Sounds totally plausible for a nonfiction novel?

The ODESSA, from the German Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, meaning “Organization of Former SS Members,” is believed to have been an international Nazi network set up toward the end of World War II by a group of SS officers. The purpose of the ODESSA was to establish and facilitate secret escape routes, later known as ratlines, to allow SS members to avoid their capture and prosecution for war crimes. Most of those fleeing out of Germany and Austria were helped to South America and the Middle East.
Ronaldo Hermann Schmitz (* October 30 1938 in Porto Alegre , Brazil ) is a German managers. 
After high school in Rio de Janeiro from 1958-1962 Schmitz studied at the University of Cologne Business Administration and Economics. In 1965 he received his doctorate there and earned an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau . 
In the same year appeared in the Schmitz German trust company a year or two later, he joined BASF to Ludwigshafen . In 1980 he was in the Board appointed by BASF. When he is not the successor to the 1989 CEO Hans Albers was, he joined in 1990 as General Manager for Deutsche Bank, with its former spokesman, Alfred Herrhausen he was acquainted. In 1991 he joined the board of the bank one...
The board dismissed Ettore Gotti Tedeschi on May 24, a day before Vatican police arrested Pope Benedict XVI's butler for allegedly leaking sensitive papal documents to the press in an apparently unrelated case. 
Ahead of the board meeting, according to letters in the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano that could not be independently verified, the bank's vice president Ronaldo Schmitz threatened to resign if Gotti Tedeschi was not dismissed. 
Gotti Tedeschi "does not have the necessary qualities to guide the Institute," Schmitz wrote in the letter, referring to the bank's official name, the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR under its Italian acronym. 
"He has aggravated the situation with his inertia and his lack of loyalty towards staff and lack of transparency to the board," Schmitz said, addressing himself to the Vatican's powerful Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone. 
"I am confident that Your Eminence will immediately end president Gotti's mandate. I do not want to continue to serve with Gotti Tedeschi. I will present my resignation by the end of May 2012 if he is not dismissed," Schmitz wrote. 
His comments were backed up by Carl Anderson, another board member, who said: "I have reached the conclusion, after much prayer and reflection, that Gotti Tedeschi is no longer able to guide the Institute in difficult times.

( I could not write fiction stranger than the real spies, bankers and corruption stuff going on now with the Vatican and the USCCB. )

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Vatican Bank IOR Scandal Continues – Mafia Backlash Feared – Gotti Tedeschi

Old banking habits at Vatican Bank IOR are hard to break. 



Ettore Gotti Tedeschi feared for his life because his efforts to crack down on alleged money laundering and making the bank's operations more transparent had targeted accounts held by mafia godfathers, the Italian media reported. 
The banker was preparing to send a copy of a dossier of letters, emails and other documents that he had compiled to Monsignor Georg Ganswein, one of Benedict XVI's two private secretaries. 
He had also requested a private audience with the Pope a few days before he was ousted by the board of the bank on May 24 after three years at the helm of the institution. 
He left instructions with his secretary to send two other copies to a lawyer and to a prominent Italian journalist, with notes saying that if anything happened to him, the explanation would be found within the documents. 
The secret dossier consisted of 47 binders of documents, including some which related to Mr Gotti Tedeschi's efforts to convince Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state and de facto prime minister, of the need to clean up the bank's activities so that the city state could join an international "white list" of financially transparent countries.

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Tornay and Estermann – Victims of Papal Politics and Abuses of Power? – Opus Dei

Cedric Tornay's Medal

Considering my timeline piece and the possible real connection of John Paul IIs rehabilitation of Cardinal Rigali back into JPIIs power circle, the response tells me that there is a worldwide hunger to find out about the possible faked “suiciding” of Cedric Tornay, the Swiss Guard scapegoat caught up in the greater politics of Free Masonry and Opus Dei within the ranks of the little people in the Vatican surrounding the Papal Monarchy.

One thing begins to emerge from reading.  That many young professionals are recruited by secret organizations such as the P2 Italian Masons and Opus Dei to spy on their superiors. They are often asked by important clerics such as bishops and cardinals to do this in the name of some greater glory of faith.  The truth is that pawns in these spying operations get rewarded with promotions or murdered or even arrested like the pope’s butler Paolo Gabriele, himself a member of the Communion and Liberation Catholic cult that surrounds the pope much like the late paranoid American billionaire Howard Hughes surrounded himself only with an army of Mormon bodyguards.

The power brokers are spying on each other in the Vatican in order to perpetuate power in the next papal election.  It is important that the next election delivers the right results.  Otherwise a lot of cronies backing the wrong horse will have to pay back a lot of Vatican Bank interest free loans on day one of a new hostile papacy of some other party.

Considering how Cardinal Rigali got rehabilitated and is now still actively serving on committees in the Vatican, the death of Alois Estermann, his wife, and Cedric Tornay is an important example of power politics played out in the lives of many, many victims, not unlike two million abused Catholic children over the last fifty years within the RCC.
 
And if you look at Rigali’s protégés, Monsignor Lynn of Philadelphia Child Endangerment fame, Opus Dei Bishop Finn in Kansas City and Predophile Bribe/Bonus payer Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York City in this one big Circle Jerk of power and abuse of power in the RCC, you see how unstable and sad the world has become on the global stage because of the cesspool of power in the Vatican and its extended power games worldwide.

From the Internet on Cedric Tornay:
...Neither version fit for Muguette Baudat. She noticed numerous discrepancies in her son’s last letter to her (released by the Vatican) and concluded the letter was either doctored or a forgery. When Tornay’s body was flown to Switzerland for the final funeral, Baudat literally stole the body from a Swiss morgue to have a second autopsy done by Dr. Thomas Crompecher, professor of forensic medicine at the University of Lausanne. Based on his conclusions, Baudat retained Luc Brossolet and Jacques Verges, the two French lawyers who had defended Slobodan Milosevic before the World Court at the Hague. At a press conference her lawyers released a seventy-five page report that disputed the Vatican’s version of the murders and asked for a new investigation. 
Brossolet and Verges claimed the second autopsy contradicted the Vatican’s conclusions on several points. First, Tornay’s service pistol used 9 millimeter bullets, but the exit wound in his skull measured 7 millimeters. Second, Tornay apparently suffered a fracture of a cranium bone, which was not on the bullet’s trajectory. His lungs contained a large amount of blood and saliva which could not have been caused by suicide, but could have been caused by internal bleeding due to blows on the head before he died. Third, the Vatican’s claim that Tornay had an egg-sized tumor in his head (which supported the “fit of madness” conclusion) was contradicted by the second autopsy, which found no tumor.The report also noted that Tornay’s front teeth were broken off, as if a gun had been forced into his mouth. Finally, graphologists and psychologists who examined Tornay’s final letter to his mother have also concluded the letter is a forgery. 
Despite these discrepancies, which may or may not be explainable within the Vatican’s or John Follain’s theories of how the murders were committed, the Vatican has thus far refused to reopen the investigation. Baudat’s lawyers are not accredited by the Vatican City State, so they have no standing to be heard. Brossolet and Verges tried to get accreditation, but were told by the president of the Vatican Appellate Court that “The case is closed.“ Baudat and her lawyers appealed to the pope, but there is no indication they have received a reply. It seems the mystery will remain unsolved for the foreseeable future. 
Alois Estermann’s predecessor, former Guard Commander Roland Buchs, gave a speech at Tornay’s funeral in Switzerland that Cardinal Sodano refused to allow him to say at the Vatican funeral. After noting that Tornay was well regarded by his fellow guards, and that “his first step as a young adult was to put himself at the service of the Church,” Buchs strayed from the Vatican story line even further by saying: 
”His act remains mysterious. Who can understand his last gesture? At this tragic time, may ’whys’ and ’wherefores’ remain in suspense…many questions remain unanswered. I think that God knows the real truth, and the precise reasons behind this tragedy. 
The last words will be given to Cedric Tornay’s mother. After attending her son’s funeral in Rome she remarked, “It struck me that the Vatican smelled of death.”
 
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