Vatican Bank Handled Alleged Bribes
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.
More to Read
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
