https://www.europeanceo.com/finance/top-5-financial-transgressions-committed-by-the-vatican/
Good time to revisit this article. Some highlights:
The Vatican is exceptional in every sense of the word. The tiny city-state, surrounded by Rome, is the smallest state in the world by area and population, yet it wields a unique power over the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, by dint of the fact that it holds the seat of the religion’s church. It is independent of, yet fully owned by, the Holy See, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Pope. It is, quite literally, a law unto itself. … The Vatican is an elective and ecclesiastical monarchy, with the only economic actor being the state itself. … It operates an open border and uses the euro as its sole currency, but is not part of the customs union or VAT area.
The state enjoys a number of special provisions from the EU in recognition of its unique status, which include permission to mint its own coins and exemptions from duties and taxes on imports and exports.
Part of the reason for these provisions is the uniquely non-commercial status of the Vatican’s economy. There are no non-state companies or organisations in the city-state, and it has no market – rather, it is financially supported by donations from Roman Catholics across the world. (HUGE! imagine ~1.2 billion people paying their taxes every week to a king who answers to no one…not to mention all the Catholic "NGO's", missions, tax-exempt monstaries & churches, charities, schools and universities that funnel OUR taxes into the Vatican as well!)
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Financial dealings with Hitler
The Vatican has long been criticised for signing the 1933 concordat with Germany, which eliminated official Catholic resistance to Hitler, leaving a clear path for the Nazis to assume power.
More recently, though, details have emerged about the extent to which the Vatican had financial links to the Nazis through the IOR.
In his book God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican, historian Gerald Posner writes that the Vatican received a substantial ‘Kirchensteuer’, or church tax, from Hitler’s Reich every year.
This tax, amounting to $1.7bn (€1.94bn) in today’s money in 1943 alone, was paid via the Vatican bank to avoid the transaction being tracked by any other western banks, while evading wartime financial restrictions.
It was at this point that the IOR became known as the world’s best offshore bank. The Catholic Church used the IOR to hide billions in wartime loot, much of it from Nazi sources, but because it never released its full financial records to the public, it’s impossible to tell exactly how much it profiteered from its relationship with Hitler.
Banco Ambrosiano
Despite being highly critical of tax havens, the Vatican is notorious for using the IOR to launder money for organisations with violent criminal backgrounds. Due to its status as a sovereign state, the Vatican is able to withhold transaction information from regulators and authorities, a fact that was notably exploited by Roberto Calvi in the 1980s.
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Money Laundering
The Bank of Italy launched an investigation into the Vatican’s finances in 2010 and found that the city-state was moving billions of euros between global commercial banks every year.
In 2012, JP Morgan forced the IOR to close its account with the US bank after it was found to have moved €1.5bn through that singular account in just 18 months.