#VaticanBank
7 entries tagged VaticanBank.
People (4)
- Michele Sindona Michele Sindona was a Sicilian financier, P2 member, and Vatican Bank associate known as 'the Pope's Banker' whose acquisition of Franklin National Bank produced its 1974 collapse - then the largest U.S. bank failure - and who was murdered in Voghera prison by cyanide poisoning in March 1986 while serving sentences for fraud and for ordering the assassination of Italian liquidator Giorgio Ambrosoli.
- Paul Marcinkus Archbishop Paul Marcinkus was the American-born president of the Vatican Bank (IOR) from 1971 to 1989 who authorized the bank's participation in Roberto Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano offshore shell company network and the Michele Sindona transactions, avoided Italian prosecution for nine years by remaining within Vatican sovereign territory, and returned to the United States in 1991 never having faced trial.
- Pope John Paul II Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła) was the first Polish pope and the first non-Italian pope since 1523, whose election in 1978 and 1979 visit to Poland directly catalyzed the Solidarity movement, and whose covert collaboration with the CIA under William Casey channeled approximately $50 million to Polish underground opposition networks through Vatican Bank and other conduits.
- Roberto Calvi Roberto Calvi was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest private bank, and a member of Propaganda Due whose bank collapsed in June 1982 with a $1.3 billion deficit after his offshore shell company network - backed by guarantees from the Vatican Bank - was exposed; he was found hanging from scaffolding under London's Blackfriars Bridge on June 18, 1982, eight days after fleeing Italy on a forged passport.
Organizations (3)
- Banco Ambrosiano Banco Ambrosiano was Italy's largest private bank, founded in Milan in 1896, whose chairman Roberto Calvi used a network of Vatican Bank-guaranteed offshore shell companies to export $1.3 billion from the bank before its June 1982 collapse - the largest bank failure in Italian history - which coincided with Calvi's death under London's Blackfriars Bridge.
- Propaganda Due Propaganda Due (P2) was a clandestine Italian Masonic lodge headed by Licio Gelli from 1967 whose 962-member list discovered in March 1981 included the heads of all three Italian intelligence services, senior military officers, magistrates, politicians, and financiers including Roberto Calvi and Silvio Berlusconi, and which Italian parliamentary investigators linked to Operation Gladio and the strategy of tension terrorist bombings.
- Solidarity Solidarity (Solidarność) was the Polish independent trade union federation founded in August 1980 at the Gdańsk shipyard under Lech Wałęsa that became the first legal mass opposition movement in the Soviet bloc, sustained in part by covert CIA and Vatican funding channeled in part through the BCCI network, and whose legal suppression under martial law in December 1981 and ultimate success in the 1989 elections contributed to the collapse of communist Poland.