After he took over as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was faced with a serious financial scandal. The problem was not dissimilar to the one he is now encountering in the Vatican.

Bergoglio’s predecessor, Cardinal Antonio Quarracino, was close to the Trusso family, the owners of the Banco de Crédito Provincial, an Argentine bank which in the late 1990s was going bust. To address the problem the Trussos secured a $10m loan from an insurance company for military veterans, using Quarracino’s name. When the bank collapsed, the pension fund demanded that the archdiocese repay the money. But it turned out the cardinal’s signature had been forged by one of his aides.

When Bergoglio was appointed coadjutor to Quarracino with the right of succession, he commissioned a clean-up. He brought in outside auditors to go through the archdiocese’s finances, instituted accountability procedures, sold shares in several banks and placed church funds in commercial banks. He also demonstrated to the military veterans that the archdiocese had been swindled.

The response of Bergoglio to a financial scandal in Buenos Aires is crucial to understanding his Vatican reforms, including his handling of the Holy See’s disastrous property investment in London’s Sloane Avenue and his sacking of Cardinal Angelo Becciu over claims of embezzlement. Since his 2013 election, the Pope has sought – albeit slowly – to implement a regulatory framework that will ensure that suspicious transactions are flagged and wrongdoing is prosecuted.