[rael-science] How the Vatican built a secret property empire using Mussolini's millions‏

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The Raelian Movement
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How the Vatican built a secret property empire using Mussolini's millions

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/21/vatican-secret-property-empire-mussolini

Papacy used offshore tax havens to create £500m international
portfolio, featuring real estate in UK, France and Switzerland

The Guardian, Monday 21 January 2013 20.23 GMT

Behind Pope Benedict XVI is a porfolio of property that includes
commercial premises on London's New Bond Street. Photograph:
Alessandra Benedetti/Corbis
Few passing London tourists would ever guess that the premises of
Bulgari, the upmarket jewellers in New Bond Street, had anything to do
with the pope. Nor indeed the nearby headquarters of the wealthy
investment bank Altium Capital, on the corner of St James's Square and
Pall Mall.

But these office blocks in one of London's most expensive districts
are part of a surprising secret commercial property empire owned by
the Vatican.

Behind a disguised offshore company structure, the church's
international portfolio has been built up over the years, using cash
originally handed over by Mussolini in return for papal recognition of
the Italian fascist regime in 1929.

Since then the international value of Mussolini's nest-egg has mounted
until it now exceeds £500m. In 2006, at the height of the recent
property bubble, the Vatican spent £15m of those funds to buy 30 St
James's Square. Other UK properties are at 168 New Bond Street and in
the city of Coventry. It also owns blocks of flats in Paris and
Switzerland.

The surprising aspect for some will be the lengths to which the
Vatican has gone to preserve secrecy about the Mussolini millions. The
St James's Square office block was bought by a company called British
Grolux Investments Ltd, which also holds the other UK properties.
Published registers at Companies House do not disclose the company's
true ownership, nor make any mention of the Vatican.

Instead, they list two nominee shareholders, both prominent Catholic
bankers: John Varley, recently chief executive of Barclays Bank, and
Robin Herbert, formerly of the Leopold Joseph merchant bank. Letters
were sent from the Guardian to each of them asking whom they act for.
They went unanswered. British company law allows the true beneficial
ownership of companies to be concealed behind nominees in this way.

The company secretary, John Jenkins, a Reading accountant, was equally
uninformative. He told us the firm was owned by a trust but refused to
identify it on grounds of confidentiality. He told us after taking
instructions: "I confirm that I am not authorised by my client to
provide any information."

Research in old archives, however, reveals more of the truth.
Companies House files disclose that British Grolux Investments
inherited its entire property portfolio after a reorganisation in 1999
from two predecessor companies called British Grolux Ltd and
Cheylesmore Estates. The shares of those firms were in turn held by a
company based at the address of the JP Morgan bank in New York.
Ultimate control is recorded as being exercised by a Swiss company,
Profima SA.

British wartime records from the National Archives in Kew complete the
picture. They confirm Profima SA as the Vatican's own holding company,
accused at the time of "engaging in activities contrary to Allied
interests". Files from officials at Britain's Ministry of Economic
Warfare at the end of the war criticised the pope's financier,
Bernardino Nogara, who controlled the investment of more than £50m
cash from the Mussolini windfall.

Nogara's "shady activities" were detailed in intercepted 1945 cable
traffic from the Vatican to a contact in Geneva, according to the
British, who discussed whether to blacklist Profima as a result.
"Nogara, a Roman lawyer, is the Vatican financial agent and Profima SA
in Lausanne is the Swiss holding company for certain Vatican
interests." They believed Nogara was trying to transfer shares of two
Vatican-owned French property firms to the Swiss company, to prevent
the French government blacklisting them as enemy assets.

Earlier in the war, in 1943, the British accused Nogara of similar
"dirty work", by shifting Italian bank shares into Profima's hands in
order to "whitewash" them and present the bank as being controlled by
Swiss neutrals. This was described as "manipulation" of Vatican
finances to serve "extraneous political ends".

The Mussolini money was dramatically important to the Vatican's
finances. John Pollard, a Cambridge historian, says in Money and the
Rise of the Modern Papacy: "The papacy was now financially secure. It
would never be poor again."

From the outset, Nogara was innovative in investing the cash. In 1931
records show he founded an offshore company in Luxembourg to hold the
continental European property assets he was buying. It was called
Groupement Financier Luxembourgeois, hence Grolux. Luxembourg was one
of the first countries to set up tax-haven company structures in 1929.
The UK end, called British Grolux, was incorporated the following
year.

When war broke out, with the prospect of a German invasion, the
Luxembourg operation and ostensible control of the British Grolux
operation were moved to the US and to neutral Switzerland.

The Mussolini investments in Britain are currently controlled, along
with its other European holdings and a currency trading arm, by a
papal official in Rome, Paolo Mennini, who is in effect the pope's
merchant banker. Mennini heads a special unit inside the Vatican
called the extraordinary division of APSA – Amministrazione del
Patrimonio della Sede Apostolica – which handles the so-called
"patrimony of the Holy See".

According to a report last year from the Council of Europe, which
surveyed the Vatican's financial controls, the assets of Mennini's
special unit now exceed €680m (£570m).

While secrecy about the Fascist origins of the papacy's wealth might
have been understandable in wartime, what is less clear is why the
Vatican subsequently continued to maintain secrecy about its holdings
in Britain, even after its financial structure was reorganised in
1999.

The Guardian asked the Vatican's representative in London, the papal
nuncio, archbishop Antonio Mennini, why the papacy continued with such
secrecy over the identity of its property investments in London. We
also asked what the pope spent the income on. True to its tradition of
silence on the subject, the Roman Catholic church's spokesman said
that the nuncio had no comment.

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"Ethics" is simply a last-gasp attempt by deist conservatives and
orthodox dogmatics to keep humanity in ignorance and obscurantism,
through the well tried fermentation of fear, the fear of science and
new technologies.

There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history, 
it is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.

On the contrary, let us embrace Science and the new technologies
unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the
myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease,
death and the sweat of labour.

Rael
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