**The last financial scandal at the Holy See, which has already taken over the post of the head of security of the Pope and has splashed the prime minister of Italy, unleashes another internal storm** The finances of heaven are usually a shortcut to hell. Mobsters, hanged bankers, conspiracies, kidnappings and other milestones of the black chronicle around the money of God confirm that no one is able to put them in order. After almost seven years of Francisco's pontificate, the problems remain unresolved : the numbers are in red, the Economic Secretariat remains headless - its responsible, Cardinal Pell is imprisoned for child abuse and has not been replaced- and the snowball formed around the last investment scandal in London, described by the Secretary of State himself, Pietro Parolin, as "opaque", has led to a dirty war that has been going on for years between different departments of the Vatican. The shock wave has reached, among others, the Pope's chief of security, Domenico Giani (forced to resign), several cardinals around whom a hunt has been organized and the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte , consultant in the operation when He was still a lawyer. And it has just begun. Francisco announced at the beginning of his pontificate that the first reform, despite not being his favorite, would be the economic one. Seven years later, the Secretariat he created is still headed; the auditor who hired to review the accounts was fired, intimidated and threatened to be jailed if he did not resign; the deputy director of the IOR, Giulio Mattietti, historical memory of the entity, found himself in the street without being able to enter the office overnight and the Council for the Economy, which is chaired by Cardinal Reinhard Marx, remains unrenewed despite having his term expired last February. The question that almost no one is able to answer - and none of the respondents wants to comment on the phone for fear of having it intervened - is who is in charge of finances. “We will like it or not, but it is the way to command this Pope. He works like this, ”says a senior charge of the curia. The core of the explosion, which this week generated an unusual crossing of accusations between the Secretary of State and who was his second, the charismatic Cardinal Angelo Becciu (both later resolved the issue), is this time in the so-called Óbolo de San Pedro : the instrument of the Holy See to collect donations from the Catholic world (currently about 150 countries). The organism was promoted in 1870 when the Pope lost the Papal States and the Catholic nations had to contribute to the survival of the Vatican: one part is dedicated to charity and the other - today is 70% - to pay operating expenses and others Unspecified matters. But the important drop in revenue, linked in recent years to the scandals of abuse in the US and the decline of the faithful - has spent 101 million euros in 2006 to 51 in 2018 - invites to increase the risk of investment operations to make profitable the small profits. Here began a situation "very delicate", explains one of the protagonists. The Óbolo de San Pedro depends on the Secretary of State, increasingly dispossessed of powers (ceased to control the communication after the last reform) and permanently subject to rumors (the latter places its owner as the new patriarch of Venice). After the scandals of the Institute of Religious Works (IOR), known as the Vatican Bank, at the beginning of the 80s with the bankruptcy of the Ambrosian Bank, it was decided to reduce the risk by diversifying the income management among the entity - whose revenues have also fallen in half— and the Secretary of State. Pius XII, as Becciu recalled in his defense this week, has already opened the door to real estate investments. So this agency decided to do so in 2013 by entering the capital of an investment fund that had bought a luxury property in the London neighborhood of Chelsea. The vertigo of an operation in which the current Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte participated as a consultant a month before being elected (as published by the Financial Times ), crystallized at the end of 2018, in the middle of Brexit. The secretary of state had to request the exit of more money - about 150 million dollars - to get the entire building and not lose an investment that was in danger. The IOR, allegedly alarmed by the high sum, ended up denouncing the situation to the Vatican prosecutor, who began an investigation that has unleashed a high psychosis among some members of the curia. There were records in the offices of the Secretary of State and the names, surnames and photo of the investigated were filtered, including that of Tommaso Di Ruzza, director of the IDA, the body that is responsible for preventing money laundering in the IOR. “That is part of the problem. The AIF and the bank are always at the gresca. And there may be an ongoing investigation that they have tried to camouflage with the complaint, ”says a senior Vatican official who knows in detail the finances of the Holy See in his office. The head of the Gendarmerie - and the personal security of the last three popes -, Domenico Giani, resigned from the leak of L'Espresso , which goes back to the Holy See at the time of Vatileaks . Francisco, although he later decorated him, said it was a "mortal sin" and accepted his cessation instantly. All this while facing for the first time the ghost of bankruptcy, as detailed by 3,000 classified documents journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi in the book Universal Judgment . A somewhat apocalyptic projection taking into account the huge real estate heritage of the Holy See, but very useful to show a certain inability to manage it. The APSA, the company that controls all Vatican properties (about 4,400 properties worth about 2,700 million) and has become a parallel bank, closed 2018 with an operating result of -27%: the first time in its history that is placed in red numbers. The argument is that he had to rescue the Istituto Dermopatico dell'Immacolata (IDI) bankrupt (also for different frauds) with 25 million euros and all the losses of the loan granted by the APSA in the same year were placed so as not to drag them to the next. But no one at the Holy See already relies on the management of an entity that claimed the arrest of its former director, Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, for money laundering. “There are properties that do not yield anything because they are rented to do favors that can then be charged in one way or another, but that hurt the economy, ”explains a former head of finance for the Holy See. Specifically, 15%, according to Nuzzi's book, and half at favor prices. The average rental value is about 8 euros per square meter, a reduction from the market price that goes from 20% to 80% in some cases. No one doubts, however, that the crisis opened in recent weeks goes beyond the economic and touches the capacity of service to the Church of a large group of its employees. The Pope has hired a new prosecutor, Giuseppe Pignatone, a magistrate who decided to file one in 2012 the case of the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, who was always linked to a dark plot around the IOR and the bankruptcy of the Ambrosian Bank. A tough guy, yes, accustomed to dealing with mafia affairs in Sicily, Calabria and Rome. An unequivocal sign of the nature of the problem that the Holy See is dragging in which London, as it was already in the time of Roberto Calvi, is again a cursed city. https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/11/02/actualidad/1572705299_833356.html