Vatican Bank Handled Alleged Bribes
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VATICAN CITY — A senior Roman Catholic cardinal admitted Thursday that the Vatican bank had handled $62 million in bribes alleged to have been paid to Italian political parties by the Ferruzzi family industrial empire.
Cardinal Rosario Castillo Lara, head of a Vatican commission that oversees the work of the bank, which is called the Institute for Religious Works, said in a newspaper interview that the bank had not known how the money would be used.
He denied claims by a former head of the chemicals group Montedison, a Ferruzzi subsidiary, that the bank had earned up to $6 million in commissions on the transactions.
“We were used for an operation whose purpose we were not aware of,” Castillo Lara told the Milan daily Corriere della Sera.
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