Problems at the IOR surfaced again this weekend when several Italian newspapers published reports about the contents of the 'confidential memorandum' written by former IOR president Ettore Gotti Tedeschi last year before he was ousted as IOR president, and which was among documents confiscated during a police raid on his his homes and offices in Milan in June 2012, less than two weeks after he was 'fired' from IOR. None of the reports cited how the reporters got hold of the memorandum. Here is how La Stampa reported it, and the subsequent reaction from Gotti Tedeschi's lawyer. This post necessarily contains many parentheticals, because the memorandum is written for people who know all the persons involved and the references made...
Venom at the Vatican:
What was contained in Gotti Tedeschi's
confidential memorandum on IOR last year
by Guido Ruotolo
Translated from
April 20, 2013
For two more months, he had to be looking over his shoulder, fearing he could end up hanging dead from Blackfriars Bridge in London like Roberto Calvi
[the Italian bank president at the time of the 1980s Banco Ambrosiano crash that cost the bank's major partner IOR at least $250 million to restitute bsnk depositors.]
In Msrch 2012, two months before he was unceremoniously thrown out as president of the Vatican 'bank' IOR, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi had written a confidential memorandum to be released in case anything 'happened' to him.
He sent it to his secretary instructing her that when the need arose, she should send the memorandum to three persons: journalist Massimo Franco, who writes for Corriere della Sera; editor Giovanni Maria Vian of L'Osservatore Romano
[for whom Gotti Tedeschi had provided front-page editorials and commentary on financial and economic matters]; and a childhood friend identified only as 'Engineer Garofano'.
What emerges from the memorandum is the account of internal dissension at the Vatican over IOR, in which Cardinal Secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone opposed Gotti Tedeschi and others who were his allies among Benedict XVI's associates.
As a result of which he feared for his life, in addition to feeling hemmed in, stepped on, spied upon and having his correspondence intercepted. To the point of deciding to write this memorandum.
He cites, as 'a marginal fact but one that cannot be under-estimated', a warning he received from Pietro Orlandi
[brother of Emanuela, the Vatican teenager who disappeared mysteriously more than 30 years ago] who told him: "After TB (Cardinal Bertone) found out that you have been speaking to GG (Mons Gaenswein), he gave orders to isolate you and keep you under close watch"
[I don't know why Orlandi should even be considered a credible source, even if Gotti Tedeschi thinks the statement is 'marginal', since he has an axe to grind against the Vatican, and is no longer employed at the Vatican as his father once was.]
But Gotti Tedeschi also makes clear that other figures in the Vatican were equally hostile to him. "I am being spied on, or at least I feel that. Lena knows exactly who are the people I meet with.
[Jeffrey Lena is the US attorney hired by the Vatican to represent its interests in the USA, but apparently also a close adviser of Cardinal Bertone, who asked him to help revise the original financial transparency law promulgated for the Vatican by Benedict XVI in December 2010]. All my visitors and calls are reported by Cipriani
[Paolo Cipriani, lay managing director of IOR]. My e-mails are opened and read. And at least twice, mail addressed to me at IOR was opened by the Secretariat of State".
But beyond the apparent personal affronts to him, Gotti Tedeschi speaks of the never-acknowledged existence of lay accounts in the IOR
[which is supposed to cater only to diocese, parishes, religious orders, and individual bishops/priests/nuns]
He says
[in a statement that makes sense only to those who understand who the names refer to, but the editor provides the necessary information], "I must recall that lawyer Severino
[Paola Severino, who would become Italian minister of justice in the Monti government] told me. asking my discretion, about a conversation with Briamonte
[Michele Briamonte, a lawyer who has been a consultant to IOR] who confessed his role was to deal with the lay accounts, especially that of Geronzi"
[Cesare Geronzi, a Roman banker who is now the president of a federation of insurance companies].
Severino has quickly reacted, claiming, "I know nothing about this. I never had a confidential conversation with Briamonte, and I knew nothing about the Geronzi account".
Gotti Tedeschi sent the e-mail with his three-page confidential memorandum to his secretary at 5:21 p.m. on March 27, 2012. It was preceded by a brief note of instructions: "In case anything happens to me, any accident of any type, in whatever circumstance and at any time, you are authorized to give these and the following document files to these persons".
He said he had sent the document file as early as January 2012 to Mons. Gaenswein. Now, he also wanted it sent with the memorandum to editor Vian and his friend Garofano.
But all three recipients of the confidential memorandum (Franco, Vian and Garofano) were also to get a copy of an earlier confidential memorandum dated March 13, 2012, about the lay accounts, sent to Mons. Angelo Becciu, deputy Secretary of State.
"Since in recent days, I have been the object of specific attacks through the press (Il Fatto Quotidiano), through blogs in korazym, through SMS (by lawyer Lena), and orally (from Cipriani), and since at the Vatican, such matters tend to be overlooked, I must point out that these attacks are meant to bring down my credibility and my reputation by presenting me as a traitor to IOR: that I have been releasing private documents (my own), that I was to blame for the financial transparency law that constituted the Financial Information Authority
[AIF, the body created by Benedict XVI in the December 2010 law to oversee and report on the financial activities of all the Vatican organisms], conspiring in this way with Mario Draghi of Banca d'Italia to destroy Vatican finances".
Gotti Tedeschi names his principal opponents at the Vatican other than Cardinal Bertone: Marco Simeon, a protege of Bertone who is the director of Italian state TV RAI's Vatican bureau; IOR managing director Cirpriani, and lawyer Lena.
"I recall getting two warnings from Simeon and Cipriani: 'You will go down in history for having destroyed IOR'. Meanwhile, he said, they were progressively discrediting him with Cardinal Bertone, and had "also sought to discredit me with Mons. Gaenswein (they failed) and His Holiness".
He claims Simeon's warnings "followed a failed attempt" to coopt him regarding the Geronzi account. He then expresses his concern over "the indifference of the Secretary of State to a description of these facts"
[apparently those contained in the memorandum to Becciu],, but most especially, "with the trust he places in lawyer Lena, a cross between the secret agent and the bumbling inspector in the film Pink Panther".
But Gotti Tedeschi considered these as 'marginal' aspects, compared to a 'most serious fact' made known to him by Mons. Gaenswein - about "calumnies which the Secretary of State passed on to GG about things I had supposedly said against the Pope. Only the intelligence, perspicacity and good faith of GG allowed me to explain myself about these supposed calumnies. And led me to prepare the dossier for him".
He continues, "Another marginal fact that is useful to know is the attitude taken towards me by Mons. Balestrero
[Ettore Balestrero, a ranking SecState official who was a trusted aide of Bertone, and whom Benedict XVI named Nuncio to Colombia last February]. He reacted with irritation when I told him, during an inspection visit of Moneyval, that it was my task to make sure the Holy See would get into the 'white list'
[of financial institutions given the seal of approval for using adequate financial transparency measures against money laundering and financing of terrorist activities]. He said, no, it was his task. In fact, (to the surprise of Cardinal Bertone himself), I was not informed, invited nor involved when the Secretariat of State amended the December 2010 law
[to give the SecState equal say as the AIF in overseeing Vatican finances].
[According to all the reports in early 2011, Benedict XVI had entrusted Gotti Tedeschi with the Moneyval effort, having asked him to draft the December 2010 law, in which the then IOR president sought the help of the lawyer who had drafted a similar law for Italy. It must be remembered how revolutionary the December 2010 law was - being the first time in almost 2000 years that the Vatican would be making all its financial activities open even to scrutiny by an outside institution, in this case, an international one like Moneyval, an office of the European Union. In July 2012, months after Gotti Tedeschi's ouster, Balestrero led the Vatican delegation to Strasbourg which received the interim report of Moneyval on the Holy See's financial transparency measures.]
Gotti Tedeschi ends his March 26, 2012 memorandum by quoting an SMS he received from lawyer Lena, which was copy-furnished by the latter to Cardinal Attilio Nicora, head of the AIF, to Fr. Cristian Falcetto
[no identification provided], and Prof. Marcello Condemi
[the Italian lawyer who helped draft the December 2010 law] as a member of the AIF.
The SMS said: "Dear President Gotti Tedeschi, do you really think that as legal representative of the IOR, it is at all legitimate for you to meet with members of the AIF - its president, its directors and its management? Are these meetings to secretly work against Law 127
[the amended December 2010 law, which both Cardinal Nicora and Gotti Tedeschi thought diluted the authority of the AIF]? Are you sure you know what you are doing?"
That, too, sounded like a warning to all the persons who got the SMS. In fact, on May 26, Gotti Tedeschi was ousted from the IOR by a no-confidence vote taken by his four colleagues in the IOR board
[and the unprecedented release of an internal memorandum explaining the action, citing a variety of reasons from Gotti Tedeschi's alleged incompetence to questioning his psychological condition.]
Shortly after the police raids on Gotti Tedeschi's home and offices last year, La Repubblica had reported on the 'confidential memorandum' but without the detail available this time, and added that Gotti Tedeschi feared enough about his life that he hired a private security escort and agency to protect him.
Today, this reaction from Gotti Tedeschi's lawyer:
Gotti Tedeschi's lawyer decries
release of confidential memorandum
Statement from Fabio Palazzo
Translated from
4/21/2013
Following the publication in the media of a private document - what has been tagged 'Gotti Tedeschi's secret memorandum' - our client has asked to make the following clarification.
The document was specifically kept private by our client who had written it (in March 2012) at a time of great tension and concern over attacks against him, and represents his strictly personal, private and even intimate reflections as he tried to interpret the events in which he became involved.
The document, as he writes in its introduction, was intended to be sent to the indicated persons only and exclusively, in case reasons were to be found for any events to his person which at that time he feared.
Contrary to what Corriere della Sera claimed in its report about the memorandum yesterday, and as my client has said on several occasions, he never delivered any documents to the Magistrates, who have the documents that were confiscated during the search of his homes and offices on orders of the Prosecutor of Naples [last May] in connection with an investigation which had nothing to do with IOR and in which Mr. Gotti Tedeschi was heard only as someone who knows the person under investigation.
Our client firmly denounces the publication of his memorandum, which he never intended nor provoked, and asks how it is possible that a personal and confidential memorandum, acquired through confiscation of documents in an investigation that was about a matter that had nothing to do with IOR, could have become available to the media.
It is clear that the publication of the memorandum could further cause Mr. Gotti Tedeschi grave and irreparable prejudice, especially since it is about a matter about which he has maintained total privacy and discretion out of the profound respect that he has for the Church and the Holy Father [Benedict XVI in this case].
Our client reserves the right to undertake the appropriate actions to safeguard his own interests and would request everyone to refrain from publishing any more of his documents that are personal, private and therefore confidential.
In fact, despite all the buzz about the secret memorandum after the police raid on his homes and office last June, Gotti Tedeschi never made any statements following his ouster from IOR. One assumes it was because of respect for the Holy Father, and because his fears for his life turned out to be unfounded.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/04/2013 00:17]