Thu, Apr 2, 2015

The Vatican bank has been shrouded in mystery for decades, but a tax treaty agreed on Wednesday between the Holy See and Italy is a sign of changing times at an institution that is trying to shed its image as a haven for money laundering and tax avoidance.

The deal, which will require both sides to share financial and tax information, is part of a broader drive by Pope Francis to clean up the Vatican bank, or the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) as it is formally known.

For years, the bank has been seen as a vehicle to help rich Italians evade taxes and other illicit activities that were far removed from its core mission – to provide banking services for the Catholic church and help its charity reach all corners of the world.

But while the bank has been promoting its clean–up effort, little is known about the way the IOR has gone about such a monumental task.

That story begins in April 2013 when the IOR was in dire straits – cardinals were getting restless following a series of embarrassing scandals and “God’s bank” was rapidly losing the confidence and patience of its banking partners.

Elizabeth McCaul, the lead New York partner of a powerful American advisory firm called Promontory Financial Group, was no stranger to making hard pitches. In a meeting in Frankfurt with Ronaldo Schmitz, the IOR’s interim chairman, McCaul laid out the “nitty gritty” but necessary work her firm could do to haul the bank into the 21st century and resuscitate its battered reputation. Promontory had made its name – and its fortune – salvaging other scandal-ridden banks.

Schmitz’s response, according to a person familiar with the conversation, was “no thanks, we’re covered”.

But three days later, McCaul – who had helped stabilise the New York banking sector after September 11 attacks in her role as superintendent of banks – found herself in heart of Vatican City after being summoned to Rome by the bank’s new president, an aristocratic German lawyer and Knight of Malta called Ernst von Freyberg.

He hired the firm following a unanimous vote by the board of the IOR and within another 48 hours, Promontory had a 25-person team in place.

“Von Freyberg told her ‘you are the only bullet I have left,’” Max Hohenberg, an IOR spokesman, told the Guardian. “She understood that it was more than just a mandate. This was essentially a cry for help from an institution of the Catholic church.”

In a move that was as symbolic as it was practical, the president then handed his ceremonial office to the new team. They set up rows of desks to resemble a trading room floor and got to work combing through thousands of electronic and paper documents, some of which were in Latin.

Now, nearly two years later, a successor to von Freyberg is in place and Promontory has packed up after being paid €8m. The apparent transformation of the IOR could become one of the major achievements of Pope Francis’s tenure.

The pontiff has put transparency at the heart of his papacy, and a series of moves by the IOR and its regulator inside the Vatican – from the publication of two audited annual reports, to financial agreements with authorities in the US, Germany, and the UK, to the decision to press charges against two former bank managers and a lawyer for some allegedly dodgy real estate dealings – have gone a long way to show its efforts appear genuine.

“I think there has been huge progress in making the bank more transparent,” says Thomas Reese, a senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper that covers the church. “For the first time, we are getting real external auditors, not just friends of the Vatican.”

Even the US State Department, which still lists the Holy See as a jurisdiction of “primary concern” when it comes to money laundering, said in a 2014 report that changes initiated by the consulting firm would help “prevent, deter, identify and prosecute” money laundering.

Not every authority, however, is yet prepared to give the Vatican bank its blessing.

The Bank of Italy does not technically have oversight of the IOR, but the central bank has long been a thorn in the IOR’s side. In 2009, the Bank of Italy, in effect, forced Italian banks to stop doing business with the IOR because the Vatican did not have proper anti-money laundering protocols in place.

Despite the reforms since then, the Bank of Italy has not budged from that stance.

“Relationships of collaboration and information exchanges have gotten underway,” a Bank of Italy official told the Guardian. “There has been a change in direction, but there is lots of work ahead of us.”

René Brülhart, the Swiss lawyer who heads the Financial Information Authority, the IOR’s independent regulator, said: “A constructive dialogue with the Italian regulator, the Bank of Italy, is ongoing.”

The IOR insists that, with Promontory’s help, it has rapidly now created a bank compliance programme and other regulatory structures that could rival any major bank – even though the IOR’s needs are unique to the clients it serves, who include nuns and clergy working in the least developed corners of the globe, such as refugee camps in Sudan.

At the same time, the IOR has culled its client lists of any individuals who are not directly connected to the Vatican.

“It was a cleaning up exercise,” said one source familiar with the operation. In all, the IOR closed about 3,000 accounts in 2013, most were shut down because of inactivity, but about 400 were closed as a result of a board level decision.

McCaul, who is Catholic and a mother of seven, never directly met Pope Francis. But she spotted him when she stayed at Casa Santa Marta, the modest residence the pontiff chose after his election. It was a constant reminder of what was at stake.