Switzerland Foreign Investments Vatican

The Vatican on Thursday denied a German television report that its bank once held shares in a drug company producing birth control pills. However, a spokesman at the Geneva headquarters of the pharmaceutical company Serono, named in the report, said the Vatican did hold stock in its Rome subsidiary in the 1960s and possibly into the early 1970s. The spokesman, however, denied the company made birth control pills. "We're just the opposite.

The Vatican on Thursday denied a German television report that its bank once held shares in a drug company producing birth control pills. However, a spokesman at the Geneva headquarters of the pharmaceutical company Serono, named in the report, said the Vatican did hold stock in its Rome subsidiary in the 1960s and possibly into the early 1970s. The spokesman, however, denied the company made birth control pills. "We're just the opposite.