Calvi, known as “God’s Banker”, who was head of the Banco Ambrosiano — in which the Vatican held a substantial stake — was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in June 1982 with bricks and stones stuffed down his trousers and in his pockets.

A London coroner found initially that he had killed himself after the collapse of his bank with huge debts and his flight to London to avoid a prison sentence for fraud. A later inquest reached an open verdict.

The case refused to die with Calvi, however, and campaigners, including his son, Carlo, now a banker in Canada, have argued for two decades that he was murdered by the Mafia for failing to honour mounting debts to the Cosa Nostra and because he knew too much about alleged links between the Mafia and the Vatican’s finances.

Yesterday a panel of Rome judges appointed to re-examine the case said that they had no doubt that Calvi’s death had been premeditated murder. They notified four allegedly Mafia-linked figures under investigation over the Calvi case — Pippo Calo, Flavio Carboni, Ernesto Diotavelli and Manuela Kleinszig — that they would be charged. Calo is serving a jail sentence for Mafia-related crimes.

According to Ansa, the Italian news agency, the Rome judges have informed defence lawyers for the four suspects that they have 20 days under Italian law to present reasons why their clients should not be charged. If the judges are unconvinced, the indictments will go ahead and the trial to establish the truth of Calvi’s end will begin.

The judges have based their conclusion on the findings of a panel of forensic experts called in to re-examine Calvi’s exhumed remains. Their report in October said that Calvi’s hands had not been in contact with the bricks and stones that he supposedly used to weight his body and that marks on his neck — apparently overlooked in the first post-mortem examination — were consistent with death by strangulation.

The Rome judges said that the burden of evidence was that he had been lured to London, murdered and then hanged to make it appear that he had killed himself.

Preserved fragments of Calvi’s body and clothing found by chance at the Milan Institute of Legal Medicine also played a key role in the re-examination.

In December Antonio Giuffre, a former Mafia boss turned pentito (informer), told police that Calvi had been murdered. He said that Mafia chiefs had been angered by the way in which Calvi had mishandled the laundering of money. He named Calo as the organiser of the murder, which other pentiti said was carried out by Francesco Di Carlo, known as Frankie the Strangler, who was in London at the time.

Signor Di Carlo has denied killing Calvi and is not on the list of those to be charged. After being extradited to Italy, he has become a pentito.

Last year a feature film entitled Gods Bankers (sic), directed by Giuseppe Ferrara, reconstructed the case, showing Mafia gangsters subduing Calvi with chloroform on the Thames Embankment before strangling him and hanging him from scaffolding under the bridge.

The film, for which Carlo Calvi was a consultant, also pointed the finger at the Vatican, which allegedly knew of Calvi’s troubles but failed to help him, and at right-wing, Vatican-linked politicians in the illegal Masonic lodge P2, later disbanded, who used the Banco Ambrosiano to finance anti-communist causes around the world through a shadowy network of offshore funds and holding companies. Carlo Calvi said some of the “senior figures” involved were “still alive and active”.

The Vatican Bank, the Institute for Religious Works, suffered losses in the scandal, but their extent has never been revealed.

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