The bank, Crédit Industriel et Commercial,siphoned millions of dollars in fees and interest from Haiti’s treasury toFrance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Times reported.
At a time when the bank, known as CIC, washelping finance the Eiffel Tower, its executives and investors made so muchmoney off Haiti that their profits sometimes exceeded Haiti’s entire publicworks budget.
Crédit Mutuel, a European financialconglomerate, bought CIC in 1998 and operates it as a subsidiary.
But Crédit Mutuel began as an organisationto help rural farmers in the late 19th century in Europe, making for what itschairman described as a potentially uncomfortable clash with the newrevelations about CIC’s activities in Haiti during the same time period.
“This is sort of an awkward situation, morethan a century later, to have this mutual bank owning a bank whose history islinked with colonialism,” Crédit Mutuel’s chairman, Nicolas Théry, said in aninterview.
Nearly all of CIC’s archives from that erahave been destroyed. Théry said he had already been in touch with universityscholars about financing a team, ideally of Haitian and French researchers, tobring the bank’s full history to light.
The Times article traced how CIC set up andmanaged the National Bank of Haiti from Paris. Records show it made noinvestments in Haitian businesses and charged fees on nearly every transactionthe Haitian government made. At a time when many French investment returnshovered around 5%, investors in the National Bank of Haiti cleared an averageof 15% per year. Some years, the margins approached 24%.
The profits help explain why Haiti remainedon the sidelines during one of the most important development periods in modernhistory.
At one point, Haiti earmarked about half ofits most important revenue source — coffee taxes — to paying CIC and itsinvestors in the National Bank. Parisian financiers also used their allies inthe French government to put pressure on Haiti not to disrupt the bank’soperations, the Times reported, citing diplomatic correspondence.
“It was a very good demonstration of thelinks between the financial, the military and the political powers in France atthe end of the 19th century,” Théry said. He called it an “ecosystem ofcolonialism.”
“This is a very sad illustration of themeaning of colonization and financial colonisation,” he said.
Théry said he did not know whether, morethan a century after it ended its operations in Haiti, the bank owed Haiti anymoney. He said researchers would have a wide mandate to pursue any informationon any topic.
“It’s a matter of principle for us,” hesaid.
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