Word: banco
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Your article "The Great Vatican Bank Mystery" [Sept. 13] was a cheap shot. Banco Ambrosiano, with small I.O.R. holdings, can hardly be called a Vatican anything. Roberto Calvi was probably guilty only of greed and poor judgement. Italy's leaders, who are anticlerical, should not be allowed to divert attention from their economic bungling to the thin Vatican connection. Banco Ambrosiano is just another example of the weakness of the world banking system...
...Italy unleashed such a furor that high military and security officials whose names were found on the rolls were forced to resign; so was Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani, though he was not a P2 member. Gelli's name was also linked to the collapse of Milan's Banco Ambrosiano, whose president, Roberto Calvi, was not only a member of P2, but was believed to be the lodge's paymaser, allegedly funding right-wing Latin leaders who were friends of Gelli...
With an Italian prison term awaiting him, Calvi fled to London. There he apparently hanged himself last June, although many Italians believe he was murdered. An attorney general of a Swiss canton has since discovered that close to $100 million of Banco Ambrosiano's money had been stashed in numbered Geneva accounts. And Licio Gelli knew the numbers...
Says Sindona: "Our goal was to buy control in Banco Ambrosiano." Sindona says that he first introduced Calvi to Archbishop Paul Marcinkus in 1971, the year the priest became president of the Vatican bank. Sindona strongly denies that he paid Calvi and Marcinkus a $6.5 million commission as part of a business deal in the early 1970s, as has been widely reported. Says Sindona: "I did give $6.5 million to Calvi, much more than that, but that was to buy shares of Ambrosiano and other stocks. None went to Marcinkus unless Calvi gave it to him." Sindona insists that Marcinkus...
Sindona also discussed his involvement with Calvi and other members of the Italian Masonic Lodge P2 in sending Banco Ambrosiano money to Latin America to support right-wing political causes. "Calvi financed newspapers for ideological reasons in Buenos Aires and Montevideo...