God's Banker by Rupert Cornwell

the Veneto bank. On the face of it, an excellent arrangement for La Centrale, whose lustre had been tarnished by the departure of such as Evelyn de Rothschild from its board after the Hambro's disengagement.
    Rather less appealing, had shareholders known about it, was the underside of the deal. Pacchetti had been sold by a Luxembourg shell company of Sindona's called Steelinvest, to a concern with the weird name of Zitropo Holding, also of Luxembourg. As would also later emerge, fat commissions seem to have been paid as well. Calvi was to hint that, yes, Zitropo might have something to do with Ambrosiano. But he was acting on behalf of an "important client", and more he could not say. In the light of what happened later, that client might even have been the IOR. As for Pacchetti, it was a child's doll to be cast aside. In a few months Sindona had inflated its price from 200 to 1,200 lire per share. Now it would be used as a staging post for shares traded between Calvi and the Bonomis, before being left to decay. By
    June 1982, as the deluge overtook Calvi, its shares were worth just 75 lire apiece.
    Apparently, though, someone did object to the sale of Banca Cattolica del Veneto by the Vatican. He was Albino Luciani, Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, in whose archdiocese the bank mainly operated. The story goes that he protested to Marcinkus at the IOR about the transaction, but received little sympathy. Later Cardinal Luciani was to become Pope John Paul I. But he reigned for only a month, in 1978, far too short a time to bring the IOR to heel.
    But Pacchetti was not just a prime example of how the Milan market could be abused by the unscrupulous. Its sale to Zitropo was the first of the financial skeletons which Calvi was to hide away abroad. In return for Pacchetti, Zitropo/Ambrosiano paid Sindona $40 million. The money in fact came from Cimafin, a Liechtenstein front company, which in turn was lent the money by Compendium (later Banco Ambrosiano Holding) in Luxembourg. In the end, Pacchetti would cost Calvi, if subsequent capital increases and com­missions were included, over $80 million at the then exchange rate. Thus Ambrosiano's foreign liabilities began, and thus Calvi began his habit of accumulating treasures in Italy at the price of troubles abroad. Zitropo was to be a millstone to the end.
    But in late 1972, Calvi was blandly asking Ambrosiano's sharehol­ders to agree to a capital increase, to enable the bank's foreign business to be "expanded further". As usual he was finding it hard to tell the whole truth, or even a significant part of it; and on that occasion the deception did not stop there.
    Ever since the previous February, Calvi had been travelling through a separate financial labyrinth, which would lead to control of another rich bank. This time his object was Credito Varesino, based at Varese, to the north-west of Milan. As so often the IOR was a staging post. Put simply, Calvi bought Credito Varesino from the Bonomis; but his means were typically contorted. By the end of 1972, Calvi controlled 35 per cent of the new bank, a decisive interest—but for six months the shares involved were oddly left with the IOR. Calvi had sold them in April to Giammei, notoriously the Vatican bank's stockbrokers in Rome, for 11 billion lire. In October La Centrale, in other words Ambrosiano, bought them back, but for 31 billion lire. This remarkable difference of 20 billion lire was not, however, a profit for the IOR. It had merely acted as a screen, behind which Calvi could shift such a sum around his group.
    With Credito Varesino safely netted, Calvi turned his attention to Toro, and the interests in other smaller banks in its portfolio. This time, he found the Bonomis in opposition, after Toro for reasons similar to his own. By early 1974, after a covert stock market battle, Calvi was the contender to triumph. The Bonomis had to give best, but remained allies of Calvi in some other of his obscure dealings until withdrawal