God's Banker by Rupert Cornwell Page B

and thus put an end to the policy of easy money, under which such coup-making flourished.
    The plight of Sindona became desperate. To raise the dollars he urgently needed, he planned to transfer back to Italy control of SGI, the property company he had purchased from the Vatican in 1969, and subsequently run from abroad. But someone had to provide the money—and as often in the dealings of both Calvi and himself, that someone would be the small shareholder. Sindona intended that a Milanese financial company of his called Finambro would buy SGI. Finambro's capital would be raised for the purpose to 160 billion lire from a mere 1 million lire. The public would be able to subscribe only to non-voting shares, thus leaving Sindona with practical control. Unfortunately however, schemes of that dimension required Min­ isterial approval from Rome; and this La Malfa refused to grant.
    Sindona was cornered. Despite ever more urgent solicitation of the politicians, his two Italian banks, Banca Privata Finanziaria and Banca Unione, saw their troubles steadily worsen. Hope flickered briefly in mid-1974, as the Nassau subsidiary of the Banco di Roma, the big state bank traditionally closest to the Vatican and the Christ­ian Democrats provided him with a most timely loan of $100 million. But neither that, nor permission granted in extremis for a merger of the two banks sufficed. The newcomer, Banca Privata Italiana (BPI), was all but stillborn. On September 27, 1974, it was placed in compulsory liquidation after just eight weeks of life, and Milan magistrates issued warrants for Sindona's arrest, on charges of fraud and falsifying balance sheets. But with uncannily happy timing the bird had flown the day before to Taiwan, a country with which Italy had not signed an extradition treaty. Less than a fortnight later, the American part of his group collapsed, as the Franklin National Bank was declared insolvent in New York.
    Shortly afterwards Sindona resurfaced in a permanent suite in the opulent Pierre Hotel, overlooking Central Park in New York. There he would mingle public complaining that he had been the innocent victim of a witch-hunt conducted by Cuccia, La Malfa and others of the "lay" establishment of Italy, with the private conviction that he would manage to avoid trouble on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, after all, he was not without friends in the Republican administration; while his old associates at home would be kept to heel by the threat of exposure of a tantalizing list of 500 prominent Italians, said to have exported currency illegally through his banks.
    He was correct, but only in part, about Italy. The "list of 500", as it swiftly became known, did periodically cause a flutter in Italian political circles, and somehow he never was extradited back to face judgement in Milan. Indeed, notwithstanding his conviction and sentencing in 1976 to three and a half years in jail in absentia (for falsifying the accounts of Banca Unione), the Christian Democrats— or at least some of them — continued their efforts to persuade the Bank of Italy to consent to a painless solution of Sindona's difficulties right up until 1979.
    But long before that, his banks around Europe had failed. In Switzerland, Finabank had accumulated losses of $50 million when it was closed by the Berne authorities in 1975.
    To this day, no-one knows how much the Vatican lost with Sindona; Marcinkus has claimed that if earlier dealings are taken into account, the Holy See in fact shows a profit on the association. In any event, the archbishop kept his job and his influence, despite estimates elsewhere that involvement with Sindona cost the Vatican anything from $30 million to $300 million.
    Back in Milan, Calvi also looked at first to have survived with reasonable comfort the tempest caused by Sindona's passing. In­deed, the latter's departure for the United States, the quiescence of the Bonomis, and the ebbing energies of Carlo Pesenti had left him