Moneyval says Vatican must strengthen
fight against financial crime
Praises new measures instituted but notes
no suspect has yet been prosecuted
by Cindy Wooden
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
vatican city, Dec. 10, 2017 (CNS) - The Vatican has earned praise from Council of Europe experts for its updated legislation against money laundering and its vigilance in flagging suspected cases.
But the committee said the effectiveness of the Vatican efforts could not be proven until Vatican courts actually prosecuted someone for a crime.
Moneyval – the Council of Europe’s Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism – released a progress report on the Vatican’s efforts on December 8.
The experts said the Vatican Financial Information Authority “seemed to be working efficiently”, but
although the Vatican court had frozen the assets of several accounts at the Vatican bank, “the Holy See had still not brought a money-laundering case to court”.
While considerable amounts of money continued to be frozen, no criminal case had yet produced a confiscation order, a Moneyval press statement said.
Moneyval said the Financial Information Authority’s 2016 report indicated that the main offenses suspected in Vatican bank accounts it flagged for investigation involved suspected “fraud, serious tax evasion, misappropriation and corruption”.
In a statement, the Vatican said it is “committed to taking the necessary actions in the relevant areas to further strengthen its efforts to combat and prevent financial crimes”.
The Vatican also highlighted the report’s appreciation of “the creation of a specialised Economic Financial Crimes Investigation Unit within the Corps of the Gendarmerie and the appointment of a specialised assistant promoter of justice.”
The Moneyval report said the Vatican had hired two full-time officers for the new unit, both of whom are on leave from “the Italian police forces and both fully trained in modern financial investigation techniques”, but Moneyval also recommended all of the Vatican gendarmes receive training in fighting financial crimes and suggested that the Vatican City court “needs further professional reinforcement in this regard”.
“While this review cannot form a view on the quality of the evidence adduced in financial crime cases that have so far come before the [Vatican City] tribunal,” Moneyval said, “the success rate of the promoter [of justice] before the tribunal so far is not encouraging.”
Another 'secular' post is really quite amusing for thumbing your nose, Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!, at the global warming obsessives...
What's this? Polar bears
everywhere in Alaska and Russia?
Weren't they supposed to be dying off?
by Monica Showalter
AMERICAN THINKER
December 7, 2017
To climate change fanatics, polar bears are the eye candy for the worldwide call for action on global warming. There have been news reports about the sad shape they are in, with their coats going brown, their food supplies drying up, and their ice floes melting. Conclusion: The bears are set to starve.
Well, turns out there are too many of them now. According to Marc Morano's Climate Depot:
2 new papers: 92% of polar bear
subpopulations stable or increasing –
Alaskan Inuit observe 'too many polar bears' now
..Inuit observations of polar bear ecology: "Last year, there's more bears that are more fat … they rarely see unhealthy bears… back in early 80s, and mid 90s, there were hardly any bears … there's too many polar bears now."
So, instead of furtive bears withering away on ice floes and starving due to loss of habitat, rising sea levels or whatever the global warmers claim, what we actually have here is a bear explosion, with bears so well fed that they've gotten fat.
In Russia, near its Chukotka peninsula, AFP reports:
MOSCOW: A boatload of tourists in the far eastern Russian Arctic thought they were seeing clumps of ice on the shore, before the jaw-dropping realisation that some 200 polar bears were roaming on the mountain slope.
"It was a completely unique situation," said Alexander Gruzdev, director of the Wrangel Island nature reserve where the encounter in September happened. "We were all gobsmacked, to be honest"...
Several years ago, we were warned that bears were starving due to global warming and would be irretrievably lost.
I recall the first interview I did with Alaska's then-governor, Sarah Palin, about the polar bear situation in 2008, before she got famous. I asked her if the news reports were right that polar bears were starving. I only have a reference to the link, unfortunately, but I vividly recall her most memorable quote: "Our bears are healthy bears!"
She added that maybe that could be the situation in Canada, but it certainly wasn't in Alaska.
Now ABC News and NBC News are reporting that bears are flooding Alaska's villages, supposedly because of the loss of their ice floe habitat. The Washington Post is bringing them up as an argument against the GOP tax cut bill.
Problematically to the claim about the missing ice floes (unlikely now that it's winter), the photos prominently feature obese bears who clearly haven't fled any sort of famine.
Fact is, not only are the Alaska natives seeing too many bears proliferating, but so are the scientists who study them. Professor Susan Crockford of the University of Victory has observed the proliferation of bears, and far from saying they are endangered, she concludes they "are not at risk," which, of course, got her attacked by ideological leftists and those for whom global warming is a religion.
Terence Corcoran of Canada's
Financial Post notes that this bear issue and the left's shifting story on it is a magic talking point for global warmers, who go after anyone who deviates from their party line:
It's all part of an escalating epic of polar bear junk science. It begins with a paper in which Amstrup, who heads the activist group Polar Bears International, and other climate scientists – including famed temperature hockey-stick maker Michael Mann – produce what must be one of the most pathetic scientific smear jobs in the already sorry history of climate change science smear campaigns. Also along for the hatchet job was Stephan Lewandowsky, an Australian psychologist who asserts that people who have doubts about climate policy are wacky conspiracy theorists who would also tend to believe the 1969 moon landing was faked.
So instead of starving them, 'global warming'
[or whatever you choose to call actual climate conditions during this period, which is just a few decades after these same global warming wackos warned us that the world was about to enter a new Ice Age] is now causing bears to proliferate. We are supposed to be upset about it no matter what the truth is. It just goes to show that global warmers can't get their stories straight. And they want to have their bears and starve them, too.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/12/2017 19:21]