By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press
>> >VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Francis made another move to clean house at the troubled Vatican bank on Wednesday, naming a new roster of cardinal advisers to replace the ones who were in place during its latest brushes with scandal. >Only one cardinal from the previous commission overseeing the bank's operations, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, survived the cut.
By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press
European inspectors gave the Vatican a mixed report card Thursday in its efforts to comply with international norms to fight money laundering and terror financing: They praised the speedy overhaul of its legal code, but said the jury's still out on how well those new laws are being implemented.
The chief complaint in the report by the Council of Europe's Moneyval committee was that the Holy See's financial watchdog agency has yet to inspect the embattled Vatican bank, a true test of whether the new laws to fight financial crimes are being enforced at the Holy See's main financial institution.
That said, the system does seem to be working: The report revealed that 105 suspicious transactions had been flagged to the financial watchdog agency in 2013 as potential cases of money-laundering — a significant increase over 2012, when only a half-dozen were reported. The increase stemmed from a review by the bank — formally called the Institute for Religious Works — of all its accounts.
Read the entire article by clicking on the following: Vatican gets mixed report card on finance reforms - Yahoo Finance
Since his installation in March, the pope also has appointed a trusted aide to help supervise the bank while naming a special commission to investigate charges of corruption and money laundering that have dogged the institution for decades. The bank also is to start publishing its financial accounts for the first time. Now the Vatican has even reached across the Atlantic for help, recruiting Washington, D.C.-based Promontory Financial Group to conduct a forensic review and screen the bank’s client relationships
