Arcturus banner

Arcturus banner

Thursday 17 January 2013

Credit Card Ban at the Vatican

Millions of tourists who visit the Vatican every year to admire priceless art treasures including Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes may be hit by a ban on the use of foreign credit cards in the Holy See.

The Creation of Man; Sistine Chapel Detail
The Bank of Italy made the decision to impose the ban at the start of 2013; stating via its website which appeared on January 10, that
            “the presence of an effective anti money laundering regime has still not been proved”.

This all happened in spite of the favourable findings of a recent financial evaluation by the Moneyval Committee*, which showed that Vatican bank procedures conformed to 9 out of 16 core recommendations.  Financial Authority Director at the Vatican, Rene Brulhart, said he was surprised at the sanction, and insisted that adequate measures, in compliance with EU requirements, had been put in place to combat money-laundering.

Mr Brulhard says that in some cases the Holy See’s money-laundering controls were actually stricter than the standards requested by the Council of Europe’s Moneyval evaluators.

According to the Italian central bank, credit and debit card machines were installed in the Vatican by Deutsche Bank without the appropriate permission from the Italian authorities, after an agreement with another bank had expired.

Until the row is sorted out, visitors to the Holy See will have to pay cash for admission and any purchases from the Vatican’s museums and gift shops. That is bad news for the Catholic Church, as this is one of its major income streams, with over 91 million Euros earned from 5 million visitors in 2011.


* Moneyval is a Council of Europe committee of experts which assesses its members’ compliance  with all relevant international standards in the legal, financial and law enforcement sectors through a peer review process of mutual evaluations

3 comments:

  1. Very interesting. You would never think fraud would take place here.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Ryan.
      Maybe it's not all that surprising though: remember the mysterious hanging of Roberto Calvi (aka God's Banker, because of his links with the Hoply See), under Blackfriars Bridge back in 1982? Calvi was Chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in one of modern Italy's biggest political scandals. The Vatican's bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR),has been linked to several financial scandals over the years, including the failure of Banco Ambrosiano.

      Thanks for visiting the blog, Ryan.

      Delete
  2. This is highly informatics, crisp and clear. I think that everything has been described in systematic manner so that reader could get maximum information and learn many things. free credit card machine

    ReplyDelete