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Late that autumn a Venezuelan attorney, Alberto Jaime Berti, cooperated with Italian magistrates in return for immunity from prosecution on charges that the IOR was at the center of laundering several hundred million dollars through Swiss and Panamanian banks on behalf of a handful of senior Opus Dei officials.72 The Italian media reported that Berti fingered De Bonis as his Vatican Bank connection and produced dozens of documents with the monsignor’s signature. Prosecutors believed that De Bonis had the key to a safe deposit box at Geneva’s Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. It was in that box, said Berti, that a cache of documents laid out exactly how the IOR laundered the money. De Bonis, cloaked by immunity in his Knights of Malta position, denied even knowing Berti.73 The prosecutors, unable to move against him, had to stand down.
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