Information available to the daily indicates the Vatican's decision could be announced by Apostolic Nuncio Juliusz Janusz as early as today, while the daily Delo has in the meantime tweeted that Andrej Glavan, the bishop of Novo mesto, would be appointed in place of Stres as archbishop of Ljubljana.

The Slovenian Bishop's Conference has already announced a press conference featuring Janusz, Stres and Turnšek for noon today.

"Both, but Archbishop Stres in particular, had actively contributed to the financial collapse of the Maribor Archdiocese through their financially risky decisions in the years before the crisis, especially after 2003," Dnevnik said in the report.

The report noted that the two dignitaries were joining the ranks of those who had already been punished for their involvement in the scandal; former chief of financial operations at the Maribor Archdiocese Mirko Krašovec had to withdraw to St Paul's Abbey in Austria in April, while Archbishop Franc Kramberger had to retire early.

Information about who the Vatican deems responsible for the scandal that erupted in early 2011 is scarce but Dnevnik says that it has been made clear that two commissions of the pope's envoys who pored over the Maribor Archdiocese's operations ascertained that canon law had been broken.

The daily also refers to Krašovec's letter to Slovenian bishops and other Church representatives last year, which Dnevnik says made it clear that key decisions, as well as the strategy underpinning the most risky financial transactions were approved by Anton Stres as chair of the Diocesan Economic Council.

Turnšek had meanwhile served as Maribor auxiliary archbishop between November 2009 and February 2011 when he took over from Kramberger as the archbishop of Maribor.

It was the Italian weekly L' Espresso that first broke the news in January 2011 that the Maribor Archdiocese had run up EUR 800m in debts, largely due to botched financial operations by its firm Gospodarstvo rast and financial holdings Zvon Ena and Zvon Dva. All three firms have since entered receivership.