What adds to the intrigue is how closely the allegations mesh with internal Vatican politics.
They come from Libero Milone, former auditor at Deloitte, a top accountancy firm, who was appointed by the late Pope Francis in 2015 to fix the Vatican’s finances after years of scandal and neglect.
Two years later, he was forced to resign after senior officials accused him of being a spy.
He claims he was pushed out because he had identified financial wrongdoing connected to the city state’s former police chief and cardinal, Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who was convicted of embezzlement in 2023 after misusing Vatican funds.
Milone first mentioned the apparent existence of tools that could edit international bank account numbers (IBANs) in transfers in the international SWIFT system last month, following the collapse of a case he brought against the Vatican for wrongful dismissal.
The Pillar, a Catholic website, followed up with a series of articles signaling that Milone was sitting on a pile of potentially explosive material on practices uncovered during his time at the Vatican and was considering whether to deploy it to bolster his case.
Describing the IBAN editing tool as a “skeleton key for money laundering,” The Pillar said that if proven, “the Vatican would likely end up on an international financial black list of the darkest kind, frozen out of the international banking system, meaning no money could come in or out of the city state except in literal, physical cash.”
What adds to the intrigue is how closely the allegations mesh with internal Vatican politics.
They come from Libero Milone, former auditor at Deloitte, a top accountancy firm, who was appointed by the late Pope Francis in 2015 to fix the Vatican’s finances after years of scandal and neglect.
Two years later, he was forced to resign after senior officials accused him of being a spy.
He claims he was pushed out because he had identified financial wrongdoing connected to the city state’s former police chief and cardinal, Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who was convicted of embezzlement in 2023 after misusing Vatican funds.
Milone first mentioned the apparent existence of tools that could edit international bank account numbers (IBANs) in transfers in the international SWIFT system last month, following the collapse of a case he brought against the Vatican for wrongful dismissal.
The Pillar, a Catholic website, followed up with a series of articles signaling that Milone was sitting on a pile of potentially explosive material on practices uncovered during his time at the Vatican and was considering whether to deploy it to bolster his case.
Describing the IBAN editing tool as a “skeleton key for money laundering,” The Pillar said that if proven, “the Vatican would likely end up on an international financial black list of the darkest kind, frozen out of the international banking system, meaning no money could come in or out of the city state except in literal, physical cash.”