A Princess From Liechtenstein Joins the Vatican's Financial Oversight Council
Pope Leo XIV has appointed Princess Gisela of Liechtenstein to the Vatican's Council for the Economy, the body that oversees all of the Holy See's finances. She is one of eight new members named to the 15-person council, filling seats reserved for expert laypeople alongside senior Catholic clergy. Town & Country
The council was established by Pope Francis in 2014 as part of a broader push to bring transparency to Vatican finances. It consists of eight cardinals or bishops and seven lay experts, each serving five-year terms. Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, coordinates the council, and German legal scholar Charlotte Kreuter-Kirchhof serves as vice coordinator.
Princess Gisela, 36, brings a resume that sits at the intersection of engineering, mining, and wealth management. She earned a bachelor's and master's degree in environmental engineering from ETH Zurich, one of Europe's top technical universities. In 2022, she added a certified trust expert qualification from the University of Liechtenstein. Her career includes stints at Hannam & Partners, a London-based investment bank, and Midas Gold Corp, a gold mining development company in Canada.
She currently serves as CEO of Industrie-Und Finanzkontor, a wealth management firm founded by the Liechtenstein royal family. That role puts her in day-to-day charge of an institution built around the kind of financial structures — trusts, holding companies, private banking — that the Vatican council now oversees at a much larger scale.
Gisela is the younger daughter of Prince Michael of Liechtenstein and Hildegard Berta Peters. She is a second cousin once removed of Hans-Adam II, the reigning Prince of Liechtenstein, a tiny German-speaking monarchy sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria with roughly 40,000 subjects.
She joins three other new lay members on the council: Denis Duverne, Paolo Nusiner, and Elena Wettstein-Principato. The existing membership already includes at least one figure familiar to royal watchers — Leslie Jane Ferrar, who served as treasurer to King Charles III in the Royal Household from 2005 to 2012, when Charles was Prince of Wales. Ferrar's presence means the council already had a direct line of experience with a working monarchy's finances before Gisela's arrival.
What makes the appointment stand out is the collision of two worlds that rarely overlap in public view: a hereditary princess from a micro-state famous for its private banking, now helping supervise the finances of a 1.4-billion-member global institution. Leo XIV, elected in May 2025, has signaled continued interest in the financial reforms begun under Francis. Adding a CEO with credentials in environmental engineering and trust management to the oversight body fits that trajectory — though what the new council composition will mean in practice for Vatican financial policy remains an open question.
The appointments were announced through the Vatican press office on August 11 and reported by Town & Country on August 17. Hola and EWTN News also confirmed the appointments earlier in the week.
