God's Banker (3 page)

The similarities
with the Banca
Romana
scandal are glaring,
but
should not
be surprising.
For
the ground rules of the
system which
provides such periodic
abuses have remained much the same, for all
the changes that
have overtaken Italy in more than a century.
The
country has passed
from liberal monarchy through
two
decades
under
Fascism to
democratic parliamentary republic, from a heavy depend­ence
on
agriculture, to emergence as the world's seventh industrial
power and
a founder member of the Common Market.
But
for all the
depth and
breadth of the transformation, Italy has not acquired an
efficient
and transparent financial market of comparable depth and
breadth.

The
stock market where Calvi and Sindona flourished remains tiny,
the
natural
home of speculators and insider trading, despite all recent
efforts to improve its appeal. The banks remain the pivot of Italy's
financial system. Risk capital, normally provided by the share mar­
ket, is
conspicuous mainly by its absence; to raise money in Italy is to
secure a loan from a bank. The banks, however, can in turn be heavily
conditioned by
the
politicians. Even before the Ambrosiano affair,
some three-quarters
of the Italian banking system were owned by
the
State. And in many
cases the senior posts are politically conditioned
appointments, the
accepted spoils of power.

In the early postwar
years, matters were comparatively simple, as
the electoral domination of the Christian Democrat party, much
influenced by the Vatican, was assured. On the left, the Socialists and
Communists were weakened by the ripples of the cold war beyond
Italy's frontiers, and their own differences within them. But from the
mid-1950s on a subtle change took place. Although the Communists,
despite a gradual climb in their vote, remained disqualified from
power, pressures for a change in the formula by which the country
was governed steadily grew. For the first time the Christian Demo­crats began to feel that their hitherto complete sway was threatened.
The party moved to increase its control of the banking system and
of the constellation of public sector corporations which had con­tributed much to Italy's postwar "economic miracle". Inevitably,
temptations multiplied to use bank funds for mistaken industrial
ventures, conceived in good part for reasons of patronage or vote
winning.

By the early 1960s, Italy was moving leftward unmistakably. The
trend was reflected both in the birth of the "centre-left" formula of
government, bringing the Socialists into the arena of power—and in
the intensifying struggle for top public sector jobs. The process, as
might be expected, reduced the capacity of the State to act as an
independent ringmaster. Sometimes it would seem little more than
the sum of the various interest groups as they jostled for position. The
same jostling also produced the succession of short-lived Govern­ments and frequent "crises", for which Italian politics is best known
abroad.

And yet, despite this illusion of instability, the system was, and
remains, largely static. The Communists rarely strayed from the
sidelines of national power, apart from the three years up to 1979
when, on the strength of their 34 per cent vote in the 1976 general
election, they could not be denied a place in the ruling majority, if not
in Government itself. Those were the years of "national solidarity",
to be brought to an end by a decline in the Communist vote and an
increase in East-West tensions abroad.

The governance of Italy returned to a series of brittle alliances
between Christian Democrats and Socialists, condemned to the role
of
freres ennemis
; obliged to co-operate, yet the keenest of rivals.
Genuine political alternation, as in Britain and now France, where
today's opposition may be tomorrow's Government, still requires
that the Communists, the largest party of the Left, be recognized as
an acceptable partner in Government.

Thus the threat of a spring-clean by one's political opponent, that
most potent of checks and balances, does not obtain in Italy. The
system has grown in upon itself, with little prospect that abuses will be
rooted out. The Christian Democrats and Socialists, safe in the
knowledge that their position in Government will be undisturbed,
have split into factions competing as much against each other as
against the theoretical Communist opposition. These factions and
cliques, the natural descendants of the city states, communes, duchies
and kingdoms which fought through much of Italy's earlier history,
have found their new battleground in the banks and other appen­dages of the State.

Ambrosiano was the ultimate example of what could go wrong with
the system at large. It was a mutant child of an imperfect financial
structure, of the political parties' unquenchable thirst for money, of
the secret ramifications and connivances of a distorted state, of the
unresolved relations between Italy and the tiny sovereign state of the
Vatican, planted in the heart of its capital.

But the Ambrosiano affair was more than a monumental swindle. In
its way, and for at least two reasons, it was a tragedy. The first consists
of the remorselessness with which events unfolded, and the
powerlessness of those in authority to prevent, or even mitigate, final
disaster. The second element of tragedy is the central character
himself. The Roberto Calvi who emerges from these pages is not the
conventional stereotype of the financial rogue; urbane, sophisticated
and charming. True, Calvi was a skilled and unprincipled ma­nipulator, able to exert a spell over many who should have known
better. But if his fraud was on an epic scale, he himself appears
to have been in many respects a most ordinary and unimpressive
man.

It is in some ways a secondary consideration whether Calvi was
murdered or whether he committed suicide. The gods had been
satisfied, and vengeance was complete. One of those with whom the
author spoke argued that the full truth would never come out—or
that if it were to, at least half a dozen trained investigators, with
money and time without limit, should be assigned to the task. That,
obviously, has been impossible. But what follows is an imperfect
attempt to tell this remarkable, but happily far from representative,
Italian tale.

It all started
, as it would end 86 years afterwards, with the priests.
Or rather a priest. Little is known of Monsignor Giuseppe Tovini
other than the considerable imprint he has left on the Italian banking
system. But whatever his spiritual qualities, he was surely a most
resourceful and enterprising figure.

In the late 1880s he led a group of Catholics to set up Banca San
Paolo in Brescia, the industrial city today just an hour's drive east by
motorway from Milan. Indeed, to this day Brescia remains the
strongest "provincial" rival of Milan within the prosperous region of
Lombardy, the heart of industrial and commercial Northern Italy.
Then, in 1896, Tovini transferred his financial ambitions westward to
the metropolis itself.

There, on August 27 of that year, and with the blessing of Cardinal
Andrea Ferrari, archbishop of Milan since 1894, he founded Banco
Ambrosiano. Tovini persuaded more than 150 devout Catholics of
the city to put up the 1 million lire which constituted the initial capital
of Ambrosiano. He himself would be its first chairman. Curiously—
yet with deliberate point—the man chosen in another August 86 years
later to be the first chairman of the Nuovo Banco Ambrosiano was to
be the deputy head of San Paolo di Brescia. The province had had its
revenge at last. But that, of course, is to put the end of the story
almost before its beginning.

Tovini's reason for founding both banks was the same, to provide a
counter-weight to the great "lay", or non-Catholic, banks which had
emerged along with the Italian nation three decades earlier. Such
distinctions and antagonisms may seem odd to the non-Italian. But
they are a constant of the country's history, of a land over much of
which for centuries the Church
was
the State, and a dominant
temporal power in the peninsula. Guelf had fought Ghibelline, the
Reformation
ran into the Counter-Reformation. The divide, though less evident, still exists today, 113 years after Italian troops had burst through Rome's walls at the Porta Pia to annex the citadel of Catholicism for the country's capital. But in Tovini's
time, feelings
ran much stronger.

For their part, the "lay" banks were held to be strongholds of
freemasonry, the movement which contributed greatly to the unifica­tion of Italy. Chief among them was the Banca Commerciale Italiana,
whose newly scrubbed headquarters stand in Piazza della Scala barely
a stone's throw away from Ambrosiano, nestling in the shadow of the
great opera house.

Tovini had named his new bank after Saint Ambrose, the patron
saint of Milan and its archbishop in the fourth century, who had
fought throughout his life for the freedom of his church from secular
interference. And a guiding purpose of Banco Ambrosiano was "to
provide credit without offending the ethical principles of Christian
teaching", an explicit rebuke to the aggressive "lay" banks. To ward
off the unwanted attentions of outsiders, Ambrosiano's original
statute prevented any individual from owning more than five per cent
of its capital. Shareholders were required to produce a certificate of
Catholic baptism, plus a voucher for their good character from the
parish priest. Thus armed, they had to submit themselves for indi­vidual approval by the board. This
clausola digradimento
,
or "clause
of consent", was not to disappear entirely from Ambrosiano's statute
until what proved to be its last meeting of shareholders in April 1982,
just two months before the end.