In his latest move to clean up the financial scandals that have
plagued the Vatican in recent years, Pope Francis has replaced a cardinal who
headed the financial watchdog agency launched under Pope Benedict XVI with a
bishop associated with an earlier effort to foster reform.
The
Vatican announced Thursday that 76-year-old Italian Cardinal Attilio Nicora has
stepped down as president of the Vatican's Financial Information Authority, the
anti-money-laundering agency launched under Benedict XVI in 2011.
In his place, Francis has named 66-year-old
Italian Bishop Giorgio Corbellini, who will also keep his job as head of the
Vatican's labor office and head of the disciplinary commission of the Roman
Curia. The appointment to the Financial Information Authority was made ad interim, meaning Corbellini has no fixed term.
From 1993 to 2011, Corbellini was a senior official of the
Government of the Vatican City State, where he worked under Archbishop Carlo
Maria Viganò, the current papal ambassador in the United States and the former
No. 2 official at the City State.
Viganò was seen as a reformer, with a track record of cutting
costs, imposing competitive bidding procedures, and creating a centralized
system for procurement. After just 10 months, Viganò reportedly saved enough on
running the Vatican Gardens alone that he was able to fund an update of the
Vatican's heating system.
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Viganò also wrote letters to Pope Benedict XVI chronicling his
struggles against various forms of what he described as corruption and
cronyism, and in one, he asserted that his enemies were trying to force him out
in order to short-circuit reforms. That correspondence became public as part of
the Vatican leaks scandal.
Corbellini was seen as a Viganò ally, and in a January 2012
broadcast on Italian television after Viganò was removed, Corbellini
essentially backed his position.
Overall, the shift from Nicora to Corbellini is likely to be read
as a move away from the Vatican's "old guard" and toward a more
aggressive reform posture.
The shake-up at the Financial Information Authority follows a
similar move in mid-January in which Francis overhauled a commission of
cardinals that oversees the Vatican bank, among other things removing Italian
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the former secretary of state on whose watch the
bank found itself mired in a series of scandals.
René Bruelhart, the Swiss anti-money-laundering expert hired by
the Vatican in 2012 to serve as director of the Financial Information
Authority, will remain as director. If anything, most observers say, Thursday's
move strengthens Bruelhart's position by making it clear the pope supports the
broad direction in which his agency is moving.
Francis is also expected to name new members for the Financial
Information Authority's five-member board of directors, currently made up by
Italian financiers and lawyers. Most observers expect the pope to name a more
international panel.
Like Bertone, Nicora is a longtime Vatican insider closely
associated with the Italian political and financial establishment.
Among other things, it was Nicora who negotiated
a revision of the concordat, or treaty, between Italy and the Vatican in 1984
that regulates the system by which tax monies are assigned to the Catholic church,
generally resulting in annual payments of roughly $1 billion to the Italian
church.
Nicora also served from 2002 until 2011 as president of the
Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), the department that
manages the Vatican's investments and real estate.
APSA recently has been in the spotlight because of scandals
surrounding Msgr. Nunzio Scarano, a former APSA official arrested in June for
involvement in an alleged cash-smuggling scheme and more recently charged with
money laundering.
In interrogations by Italian police, Scarano
charged that several suspect practices were routine at APSA during his time
there, including running a "parallel bank" by allowing individuals to
participate in Vatican investments for a price and officials acceptingluxury vacations at five-star hotels in exchange for depositing Vatican funds
with certain banks.
Although Nicora will be 77 in March and was due to step down,
observers see Francis' decision to accept his resignation now as a sign of
wanting to break with the past.
By not naming another cardinal to serve as president, observers
say the pope also has signaled that he sees the work of the Financial
Information Authority as technical rather than political, meaning that
subject-area competence is more important than ecclesiastical status.
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