Pope Francis has dismissed the entire board of the Vatican’s financial regulator as he looks to reform the city-state’s banking practices following a corruption scandal.<\/p>\n
The move is also reportedly due to infighting among the “old guard”.<\/p>\n
The Financial Intelligence Authority’s Italian, five-person board were due to see their terms expire in 2016.<\/p>\n
They are being replaced with four international experts from Italy, Singapore, Switzerland and the US.<\/p>\n
The Vatican said the new directors include Juan Zarate, a former national security adviser to US President George Bush, and Joseph Pillay, a civil servant and adviser to the president of Singapore.<\/p>\n
The other two board members are Maria Bianca Farina, an executive at the Italian postal service and Marc Odendall, a Swiss financial consultant.<\/p>\n
Financial scandal<\/p>\n
The Pope has sought to stamp out corruption and other abuses at the Vatican bank, which handles funds for the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n
The Vatican bank is known officially as the Institute for Religious Works and has assets worth more than $8bn (\u00a34.8bn).<\/p>\n
However, it became embroiled in a scandal last year after senior cleric Monsignor Nunzio Scarano was arrested by Italian police for allegedly being involved in money-laundering.<\/p>\n
He and two others face trial for trying to move 20m euros illegally from Switzerland.<\/p>\n
As a result, there has been push to align the Holy See’s finances with international transparency rules.<\/p>\n
Pope Francis also issued a decree last year aimed at combating money-laundering and prevent any financing of terrorism.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pope Francis has dismissed the entire board of the Vatican’s financial regulator as he looks to reform the city-state’s banking practices following a corruption scandal. The move is also reportedly due to infighting among the “old guard”. The Financial Intelligence Authority’s Italian, five-person board were due to see their terms expire in 2016. They are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":23059,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-23058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}