In two recent interviews, the former president of the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), better known as the Vatican Bank, spoke about the relationship between members of the Roman Curia and a failed Italian bank, the manipulation of accounts at the IOR and how working in the Vatican led him almost to lose not only his faith, but also his life.
“The Church has nothing to do with these happenings. This is the Vatican, the Vatican Curia, where there is everything you cannot imagine,” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi said March 21 in his first interview with Italian media outlet Le Iene.
“I was about to lose my faith,” he said, before adding that working at the Vatican also made him nearly lose his life.
The interview for the most part was about the 2013 death of David Rossi, former head of communications for Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), one of the oldest banks in Europe. The institution fell into serious financial difficulty starting in the 2010s and was entangled in various political and economic scandals.
One source told Le Iene that four accounts within the IOR could be traced back to members of the foundation behind Monte dei Paschi di Siena. Before heading the Ior, Gotti Tedeschi was the head of Santander Bank in Italy, which bought the smaller Antonveneta Bank in October 2007 only to resell it in to MPS one month later.
The acquisition of Antonveneta began an avalanche of scandals and financial failures at MPS. In 2013, Rossi fell from his window to his death in an apparent suicide.
Read more at Crux