Former Vatican bank managers found liable for mismanagement

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Two former senior managers of the Vatican bank have been found liable for mismanagement and ordered to pay damages by the city state's court, the bank said in a statement on Tuesday.

The ruling was the result of civil legal action launched by the bank in 2014, the year after the election of Pope Francis, who has prioritised cleaning up Vatican finances and breaking with the bank's murky past.

The spiritual home of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics has been praised for making progress in financial regulation, but urged to deal more aggressively with people suspected of crimes like money laundering and step up prosecutions.

The bank, formally known as the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), did not name the former managers.

It did not give any details of the type of mismanagement or the value of the damages.

Paolo Cipriani, then managing director of the IOR, and his deputy Massimo Tulli resigned in 2013.

Tuesday's decision "confirms IOR's will to pursue by judicial proceedings any misconduct carried out to its detriment, no matter where and by whom," the statement said.

In its recent evaluations of the IOR, Moneyval, the monitoring body of the Council of Europe, has urged Vatican courts to bring more cases to trial.

Hundreds of suspicious or dormant accounts at the bank have been closed in recent years.

In 2017, Italy put the Vatican on its "white list" of states with cooperative institutions, ending years of mistrust.

(Reporting by Isla Binnie and Philip Pullella)