The Pope has approved by means of a Chirograph, dated June 25 and published this June 30, the new Statute of the Supervisory and Financial Information Authority (ASIF), the Holy See’s anti-money laundering body. The reform eliminates at a stroke the Presidency and the Board of Directors created in 2020, places a single Director appointed by the Pope at the head of the organization, and transfers all accountability to the Council for the Economy.
The Secretariat of State, previously present in the body’s structure, has practically disappeared from the text. Sources familiar with Vatican financial affairs warn InfoVaticana that the new design raises serious questions about the supervisor’s real independence.
A decapitated body: no President and no Board of Directors
The most striking change in the new Statute is structural. The text approved by Francis in December 2020 organized the ASIF around three organs: a President, a Board of Directors appointed by the Pope—which approved strategic guidelines, regulations, and budgets—and an executive Directorate. That scheme, essentially inherited from the former AIF established by Benedict XVI in 2010, guaranteed a collegiate instance between the Director and political power.
The new Statute eliminates both figures. Article 5 states that the Authority “is governed and represented by a Director,” appointed by the Supreme Pontiff ad quinquennium, assisted by a Deputy Director proposed by the Director himself (art. 6). There is no President, no collegiate governing body, no internal counterweight of equivalent rank. All institutional responsibility is concentrated in a single person appointed directly from above.
The Secretariat of State, erased from the map
Equally significant is what the text omits. References to the Secretariat of State, present in the previous structure of the body, have been almost entirely removed. The only remaining trace is purely procedural: the Authority’s consultants are appointed by the Pope on the proposal of the Director “through the Secretariat of State” (art. 10.2). Nothing more.
In its place, the Council for the Economy emerges as the ASIF’s main institutional reference. According to Article 3, the Authority submits its annual activity report to the Council for the Economy—with a copy to the President of the Financial Security Committee—and the Council may request “periodic reports” on its activity. The ASIF’s budget and accounts are submitted “directly to the approval of the Council for the Economy” (art. 3.3), and it is also the Council that determines how much APSA, the Governorate, and the supervised entities themselves contribute to its funding (art. 4.2).
“It’s always the same story”: doubts about independence
Sources with deep knowledge of the Holy See’s economic operations, consulted by InfoVaticana, do not hide their skepticism about the new design. “It’s always the same story: they have removed every reference to the Secretariat of State and now it seems they want it to depend on the Council for the Economy,” they note.
The problem, these sources point out, is that the Council for the Economy—an organ of fifteen members including cardinals, bishops, and laypeople, conceived to set policies and exercise oversight over the Curia’s economic structures—“does not have a structure that allows it to control in the slightest” the technical activity of a financial supervisor and a financial intelligence unit. Anti-money laundering supervision and the analysis of suspicious transactions require technical apparatus, specialized personnel, and confidentiality procedures that the Council simply does not possess.
The foreseeable consequence, they warn, is that effective control will ultimately rest on individuals rather than institutions: “They will want to appoint someone controllable as secretary of the Council, and that’s it.” They conclude with the key point of the entire matter: “The issue of independence is fundamental.”
Independence proclaimed, independence yet to be proven
It is true that the new Statute solemnly proclaims that the Authority “is assured full autonomy and independence in the performance of its institutional functions” (art. 2.1), and that even requests for reports from the Council for the Economy must be made “in respect of its operational autonomy and international parameters on confidentiality in the field of supervision and financial information” (art. 3.2). On paper, the safeguards are in place.
But the independence of a supervisor is not measured by declarations of principle, but by its institutional architecture: who appoints, who dismisses, who approves the budget, and who can demand accountability. In the new scheme, all these levers converge on two points: the direct papal appointment of the Director and the budgetary and accountability control of the Council for the Economy. With the Board of Directors gone, there is no longer any collegiate body of its own to cushion external pressures.
The issue is not minor. The Holy See’s international credibility in financial matters—laboriously built before Moneyval and the Egmont Group over more than a decade, and not without shocks, as anyone who remembers the sudden dismissal of the AIF director in 2019 following the searches by the Secretariat of State will recall—depends precisely on its financial intelligence unit being perceived as operationally independent. International standards on the matter are unequivocal: the autonomy of an FIU cannot be left to the discretion of whoever happens to occupy a secretariat at any given moment.
We will have to see, as with everything in Rome, how the practical application of the new Statute evolves and, above all, which names take the seats now left to be filled. There, and not in the Bollettino, the true independence of the ASIF will be at stake.
Full text of the Chirograph and the new Statute in the Press Office bulletin (30.06.2026).