Word: italianize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Vatican, citing its status as a sovereign state, has so far declined to cooperate with the Italian authorities, and Marcinkus has remained inside the Vatican, where he cannot be questioned by the government. But Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, the Vatican's Secretary of State, has named three respected international bankers, all prominent Catholic laymen, to examine the I.O.R.'s role in the scandal.* Casaroli has pointedly not suggested that Marcinkus did anything illegal. At the same time, however, the Archbishop of Florence, Giovanni Cardinal Benelli, a former Vatican Under Secretary of State, has told the Italian magazine Il Sabato...
...Vergil who first guided Calvi through the descending circles of these and other transactions was Michele Sindona. A onetime Italian financier and Vatican financial adviser, he is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for fraud in connection with the 1974 collapse of New York's Franklin National Bank (see box). Sindona became connected with the Vatican in the mid-1960s and later helped Pope Paul VI divest the church of its holdings in several large companies...
...I.O.R., according to Sindona, regularly moved funds out of the country for Banco Ambrosiano, which was restricted from acting on its own by Italian law. Sindona also asserts that in return for such favors, Calvi's banks paid the I.O.R. an interest rate on its deposits that was one percentage point higher than the rate other customers received. Vatican officials flatly deny that the I.O.R. ever helped transfer funds abroad for Italians...
...million appears to have been funneled through these same companies to finance South American deals. By June 1982 the shell companies owed Banco Ambrosiano banks about $1.2 billion-the $800 million they had borrowed plus $400 million in accrued interest. Calvi's scheme, and his empire, collapsed because Italian lire, in which the Ambrosiano stock was denominated, failed to keep pace with the rising value of dollars in which the loans had to be repaid...
...raided the sumptuous Arezzo villa of Licio Gelli, a Tuscan-born businessman with financial and right-wing political links to South America who served as Grand Master of a Masonic lodge known as Propaganda Due, or P2. Police found Calvi's name, along with those of other prominent Italian and South American politicians, military officers and businessmen (including Sindona), on the secret membership list. P2 was trying to support anti-Communist movements in South America and subvert the Italian state by taking control of its institutions through the lodge's influential membership. The discovery...