A senior Catholic cleric arrested in a plot to smuggle tens of millions of euros into Italy controlled vast amounts of money and felt he could act with impunity because of his connections to the Vatican bank, according to a judge’s investigative document.

In the latest blow to the Vatican’s image, Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, 61, was arrested on Friday along with an Italian secret service agent and a financial broker.

The three had plotted to smuggle €20 million into Italy from Switzerland for members of a family of ship-owners in southern Italy, an investigating magistrate told reporters .

The magistrate said the pivotal protagonist was Scarano, who worked until recently as a senior accountant in the Vatican’s financial administration, and that he owned numerous pieces of property and had accounts in the Vatican bank.

A 48-page document in which Judge Barbara Callari approves magistrates’ requests for the arrests, and which was obtained by Reuters, contains transcripts or summaries of wiretaps, e-mails, letters, cheques and other results of police investigations.

It describes the development of a plot that reads like a spy novel, involving a private plane that was to collect the cash in Switzerland, burned cell phones, a shady financier and an allegedly corrupt secret service agent who promised to slip the money past customs.

In her report, Callari wrote that Scarano felt safe “thanks to his relations with the Vatican bank”. She said the monsignor saw the IOR as “the only safe and rapid instrument for financial and banking operations that could evade – if not outright violate – laws against money laundering and tax evasion”.

The case came as an embarrassment to Pope Francis who, only two days earlier, set up a commission of inquiry into the scandal-plagued Vatican bank, formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR). Scarano was for years a senior accountant at the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, APSA.