Vatican Loses $135M In Shady London Property Deal Amid Allegations Of Massive Fraud

The Vatican stands to lose 100 million pounds in charity donations with the sale of a London luxury building at the centre of a financial scandal, a report said Monday.

Vatican Loses $135M In Shady London Property Deal Amid Allegations Of Massive Fraud

The Financial Times reported, citing unnamed sources, that the Vatican was in the final stages of selling the Knightsbridge building to private equity group Bain Capital for approximately 200 million pounds (233 million euros, $270 million).

That is approximately 100 million pounds less than the investment of about 350 million euros the Vatican made in the building beginning in 2014.

Pope Francis has vowed to bring more transparency to the Vatican’s financial dealings in the wake of the opaque, money-losing investment dating from 2013 — which spurred an investigation and allegations of fraud.

The scandal has been especially embarrassing since the invested funds came from Peter’s Pence, money donated by churchgoers for the pope’s charities.

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A once powerful cardinal, Angelo Becciu — the former right-hand man to the pope — and nine other defendants are currently on trial at the Vatican for financial crimes related to the deal.

Prosecutors have painted a picture of risky investments with little or no oversight, and double-dealing by outside consultants and insiders trusted with the financial interests of the Secretariat of State, the Vatican’s most important department charged with general affairs and diplomacy.

The current case dates back nearly a decade when the Secretariat borrowed more than $200 million to invest in a Luxembourg fund managed by an Italian-Swiss businessman, who prosecutors say used the money to invest in high-risk ventures over which the Church had no control.

After losing millions by 2018, the Secretariat tried to pull out of the deal, but the broker hired to cut ties with the fund manager is accused of instead joining forces with him.

The Vatican has a sizeable real estate portfolio, with figures released in July showing it owns 4,051 properties in Italy and another 1,120 in London, Paris, Geneva and Lausanne.

The property is to be sold to a private equity group Bain Capital.

Bain Capital & Mitt Romney

In 1984, Mitt Romney left management consulting firm Bain & Company to co-found the spinoff private-equity investment firm, Bain Capital. For the next 15 years, Romney presided over Bain Capital’s operations, which shifted focus over time from venture capitalism to leveraged buyouts. Mitt Romney profited $20K for every American laid off via Bain Capital.

Mitt Romney’s investment firm Bain Capital profited billions between 1992 and 1997 by collecting huge dividends for investors that eventually bankrupted American workers.

Bain Capital bets Billions of Dollars on India

Bain Capital is looking to deploy around $1 billion in Indian companies over the next three years. The US-based PE investor, which raised its fourth Asia-focused fund, the biggest so far, at $4.65 billion, has been a major investor in the country.

“If you look at over the last seven years, we have invested over $2.5 billion and are one of the biggest investors in the country. There is no reason why we cannot keep investing in India at the same pace,” said Amit Chandra, managing director and chairman of Bain’s India office, on the sidelines of Sankalp Global Summit held in Mumbai.

Bain’s enthusiasm to deploy a billion dollars in Indian private equity over the next few years, comes at a time when markets have remained volatile with credit flow being impacted, consumption too slowed as well as the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) – looking to pick a huge chunk of assets at the rate of pennies.

What about Indian workers?

This may sound good to the investors of Bain Capital, but what about Indian workers? Will the Bain management grant the Indian workers the same type of treatment as the American workers? Or worse?

Randy Johnson, a former worker said of the layoffs which began in the mid-1990s after American Pad & Paper, acquired by Romney’s Bain Capital, bought the paper company:

I really feel he didn’t care about the workers. It was all about profit before people. They quickly fired every single employee. They walked the fired workers out of the building. Handing them applications as they left, telling the workers if they wanted to work for the new company, they were welcome to apply.

Similarly, a number of former Dade Behring employees recalled to the New York Times how their lives were upended when their employers were acquired by Dade at the behest of Romney’s Bain Capital:

Cost-cutting became a mantra inside the company. After his employer, DuPont, was bought by Dade, William T. Mowrey, a field engineer, said his generous pension plan was replaced by a 401(k); his salary was cut by $1 an hour, costing him $2,000 a year in income. When he filed for overtime, he said, his new bosses refused to pay it. “They were just trying to milk as much out of us as they could,” he said.

Mr. Mowrey, now 54, quit. Many workers, like Mr. Shoemaker, the Dade employee in Westwood, and his wife, a temporary employee at the same plant, did not leave on their own terms. When they lost their jobs in 1997, they had to abandon plans to buy their first home together. “It created a lot of stress,” said Mr. Shoemaker, 59, who had earned more than $80,000 a year.

Looking at the past record of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, Indian workers it seem are set for a rude shock. The only question is, will Indian authorities take preventive measures before its too late?

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7 COMMENTS

  1. Short answer to the last question is “no.” A few well-placed “campaign contributions” will quiet Indian politicians. Forty years ago I first saw a business run on a small skeleton staff with no-benefits “contractors.” Now they’re called “contributors”, as lifetime employment ends in the democracies.

  2. There’s only one tribe that can successfully pull off the slo-mo collapse of the entire planetary civilization.
    It’s the very same tribe of banksters
    that was behind World War II, the
    Great Depression, World War I, 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, Armenian Genocide, as well as the Ukrainian Genocide.
    http://stateofthenation.co/?p=91370

  3. Whilst one cannot ring a bell to make the ‘animal’ behave perpetual fear just may. Long-time head of Comintern (the Communist International) Grigory Zinoviev, a Jewish Communist terrorist and Holodomor perpetrator had a strong relationship with Lenin. His quote of 1918 establishes a deliberate policy of terror and mass slaughter where on the cards “We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million the Soviet population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated”. Confirmation came from Lenin himself “Put more force into the terror. Shoot every tenth person; place all the suspects in concentration camps!”The writer Maxim Gorky describes Lenin’s reign of terrorConsequently, it was under Lenin that the most horrific torture took place. Eyes were poked out, tongues cut off, and victims were buried alive. Jewish Communist Cheka (guards) cut open their victim’s stomach, pulled out a length of small intestine, nailed it to a telegraph pole, and with a club forced the victim to run circles around the pole until the whole intestine became unravelled. Children caught eating what was considered ‘state grain’ were shot as ‘traitors’ to the state. Consequently deportation to gulags was familiar and often Europeans would be taken with no explanation. Possibly the most infamous gulag wasThe Nazino Gulag (Cannibal Island)Nazino also known as ‘cannibal island’. Speculation has that as news of the horrific tortures committed against Europeans on this desolate Siberian Island hit the Jewish press they endeavoured to deflect consequences away from their tribe.

    https://awesomeprophecy.com/lenin-the-jewish-architect-of-european-genocide/

  4. The first precept of success in making government loans lies in “creating a
    demand”, that is, by taking part in the creation of financial panics, depressions,
    famines, wars and revolutions. The overwhelming success of the Rothschilds lay in
    their willingness to do what had to be done. As Frederic Morton writes in the
    Preface to “The Rothschilds”:
    “For the last one hundred and fifty years, the history of the House of Rothschild
    has been to an amazing degree the backstage history of Western Europe. . .
    Because of their success in making loans not to individuals but to nations, they
    reaped huge profits. . . Someone once said that the wealth of Rothschild consists of
    the bankruptcy of nations.”
    In “The Empire of the City”, B.C. Knuth says,
    https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societies/ebooks/pdf/mullins_order.pdf

  5. “Wars are not fought to defeat a nation BUT TO CREATE A
    CONDITION.” How true! The war against Japan wasn’t fought
    to defeat an enemy. It was fought to create a condition—a condition of desolation and abject poverty throughout Japan. This
    was done so that the International ‘redevelopers’ could rush in
    at the end of hostilities and seize the prime real estate for their
    own use.
    Shortly after the war—after the American airborne demolition crews had done their job—vast sums of money became
    available for the reconstruction of Japan. The capital to build
    and equip Japan’s gleaming new industrial plants, ports, railroads,
    warehouses and skyscraper office buildings didn’t come from
    inside Japan. It came from outside Japan. It came from the
    same people who benefited enormously from the war debts piled
    up by many nations around the world. It came from the International Bankers. They put up the money. They own the show.P200,..,
    https://chinhnghia.com/Griffin-DescentIntoSlavery1980.pdf

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