Italy: Bank Error

The Swiss nab a fugitive

His passport identified him as an Argentine citizen named Bruno Rizzi. He turned up one day last week at a Geneva branch of the prestigious Bank of Switzerland to withdraw money — as much as $60 million, according to some reports — from numbered accounts. But Swiss police swiftly arrested him. His real identity: Licio Gelli, 63, an Italian businessman sought for 16 months for his part in two of the biggest scandals to rock Italy in years.

Gelli, who held dual Italian-Argentine citizenship, had been on the run since last year after a police raid on his luxurious villa in Arezzo, 130 miles north of Rome. There, they discovered, the financier also served as “venerable master” of a bizarre Masonic lodge known as Propaganda Due, or P2. Its membership of nearly 1,000 included powerful Italian politicians, military men and police. The fact that Gelli was apparently using the lodge to achieve political power in Italy unleashed such a furor that high military and security officials whose names were found on the rolls were forced to resign; so was Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani, though he was not a P2 member. Gelli’s name was also linked to the collapse of Milan’s Banco Ambrosiano, whose president, Roberto Calvi, was not only a member of P2, but was believed to be the lodge’s paymaser, allegedly funding right-wing Latin leaders who were friends of Gelli’s.

With an Italian prison term awaiting him, Calvi fled to London. There he apparently hanged himself last June, although many Italians believe he was murdered. An attorney general of a Swiss canton has since discovered that close to $100 million of Banco Ambrosiano’s money had been stashed in numbered Geneva accounts. And Licio Gelli knew the numbers.

What Gelli presumably did not know was that numbered Swiss accounts, under newly modified regulations, are no longer immune to police investigations. Before Gelli flew in seeking the money, the Geneva bank had frozen his account and permitted a police stakeout.

Staggering charges await Gelli in Italy if, as expected, he is extradited. They will probably include political and military espionage, illegal possession of state secrets and fraud. Magistrates investigating yet another incident that rocked Italy have reason to suspect that Gelli played a behind-the-scenes role in the explosion of a terrorist bomb in the Bologna railroad station on Aug. 2, 1980. The bomb killed 85 people and injured another 182.