Royal Bank

The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is among the biggest banks in the world. It began operating in Britain’s Caribbean colonies in the late 1800s and had branches there before it had opened any in Western Canada.

During the 1898-1902 occupation of Cuba, RBC was the preferred banker of US officials (national US banks were forbidden from establishing foreign branches until 1914). By the mid-1920s, the “Banco de Canada”, as it was popularly known, had 65 branches in Cuba.

In 1925, it published an advertisement in Canadian magazines with a map of the Western Hemisphere with dots denoting RBC’s presence throughout the Caribbean and South America. The headline read: “A bank with 900 branches: at home and abroad.”

RBC had ties to Canadian militarism. In 1917, it loaned $200,000 ($3.5 million today) to unpopular Costa Rican dictator Federico Tinoco just as he was about to flee the country. A new government refused to repay the money, saying RBC knew the public despised Tinoco and that he was likely to steal it. The book Canadian Gunboat Diplomacy notes, “In 1921, in Costa Rica, [Canadian vessels] Aurora, Patriot and Patrician helped the Royal Bank of Canada satisfactorily settle an outstanding claim with the government of that country.”

Farther afield, RBC followed Canadian troops to eastern Russia after Czar Nicholas II was overthrown and the Bolsheviks had come to power in 1917. It opened an office in Vladivostok and convinced Canadian commanders to post eight soldiers around their branch.

In 1957, RBC (with eight other banks) financed a $40 million ($350 million today) World Bank loan to the Congo, a then Belgian colony.

During the last stage of British rule, RBC director and former governor of the Bank of Canada, Graham Towers, helped write the Bank of Jamaica Law of 1960 and Jamaica’s Banking Law of 1960, which became the model for the rest of the newly independent English Caribbean.

After independence, RBC was targeted by nationalist movements in the Caribbean. For instance, the Student Society of the University of Guyana organized a May 1966 demonstration in front of the RBC’s office in Georgetown (the demonstration also passed Alcan’s office and the Canadian High Commission). In April 1970, demonstrators stormed RBC’s main office in Port of Spain, Trinidad, as part of an antiracist nationalist upsurge.

In Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas toppled the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship in 1979, RBC held 15 percent ($42.8 million) of Nicaragua’s private bank debt. On CBC’s program The Fifth Estate, Somoza explained that “the attitude of the Canadian bank has been very profitable for Nicaragua.”

Conversely, in the lead up to the October 1983 US invasion of Grenada, its socialist prime minister, Maurice Bishop, had accused RBC of “promoting destabilization” in the economy.

In recent years, RBC has grown its operations in the Gulf Cooperation Council. In 2013, RBC President Gordon Nixon was made co-chair with his Excellency Abdulla Saif Ali Slayem Al Nuaimi of the Canada-United Arab Emirates Business Council.

According to documents released in the Panama Papers leak, RBC registered 847 companies and private foundations in the offshore tax haven of the Bahamas between 1990 and May 2016.

Lastly, RBC is tied to various foreign-policy players. For example, Royal Bank Financial Group executive Robert B. Hamilton was a director of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.