Intrigue mounts over ouster of Vatican bank chief

VATICAN CITY — Intrigue mounted Saturday over the controversial ouster of the Vatican bank’s president, with leaked documents showing board members and even a psychiatrist had questioned his behavior and fitness for the job months before he was fired.

The board of the Vatican bank ousted Ettore Gotti Tedeschi on May 24 in a unanimous no- confidence vote, firing a man handpicked by Pope Benedict XVI’s No. 2 to help turn around an institution that has been plagued by scandal for decades.

The board has already made public a scathing denunciation of Gotti Tedeschi’s failings as president, saying he was impeding the bank’s efforts to be more financially transparent as the Vatican tries to get on the socalled “white list” of countries that share financial information.

Il Fatto Quotidiano daily cited a letter Saturday from a Rome psychotherapist, Dr. Pietro Lasalvia, who in March wrote to the bank’s general director with his concerns about Gotti Tedeschi’s personal behavior.

In the letter, a copy of which was obtained Saturday by The Associated Press, Lasalvia summarized his observations of Gotti Tedeschi during the bank’s 2011 office Christmas office party where he said he was “dismayed” by what he witnessed.

Lasalvia, a specialist in the psychology of workplace stress who had been brought into the bank to tend to staffers’ needs, said Gotti Tedeschi demonstrated certain behaviors linked to a pathological disorder, but stressed Saturday that his observations were not a diagnosis but merely reflections.

Emails and phone calls to Gotti Tedeschi’s lawyer and assistant at Banco Santander, where Gotti Tedeschi is the chairman of the Spanish bank’s Italian branch, weren’t returned Saturday.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, declined to comment since the matter concerned “reserved documents that were wrongly published.”

Gotti Tedeschi’s ouster has jolted the staid world of Vatican affairs, in part because of his close ties to Benedict. The firing became all the more worrisome to the Holy See when Gotti Tedeschi’s home was raided last week in an unrelated corruption probe, and documents he had prepared to respond to his firing were seized by police.

The seizure and Gotti Tedeschi’s subsequent questioning by prosecutors prompted the Vati- can on Friday to issue a warning to both its ex- bank president and Italian authorities, reminding them that its officials and documents enjoy immunity protections given that the Vatican is a sovereign state.