This series of articles from the famous and popular American daily The New York Times continue to provoke reactions, particularly in France where several financial institutions are being singled out.
Indeed a major French bank will hire researchers to dive into its history in Haiti, said the director of this company, after the New York Times published what he called “a sad illustration” of the role of the bank in an “ecosystem of colonialism”.
It is about the bank called ”Crédit Industriel et Commercial (CIC), which according to the American newspaper siphoned millions of dollars in fees and interest from the Haitian treasury to France in the late 19th and early 20th century.
”At a time when the bank, known as C.I.C., helped finance the construction of the Eiffel Tower, its executives and investors made so much money on Haiti that their profits sometimes exceeded Haiti’s entire public works budget,” the New York Times writes.
Crédit Mutuel, a large European financial company, bought C.I.C. in 1998 and operates it as a subsidiary. However, Credit Mutuel began as an organization to help rural farmers in late 19th century Europe, creating what its president described as a potentially uncomfortable clash with the new revelations about C.I.C.’s activities in Haiti during the same period.
“It’s kind of an awkward situation, more than a century later, that this mutualist bank owns a bank whose history is tied to colonialism,” Crédit Mutuel president Nicolas Théry said in an interview with the New York newspaper.
Almost all of C.I.C.’s archives from that time have been destroyed, the New York Times investigation revealed. To elucidate the bank’s role in Haiti’s poverty, Nicolas Théry said he had already contacted academics to fund a team, ideally composed of Haitian and French researchers, to shed light on the bank’s history.
The New York Times article traced how the C.I.C. created and managed the Haitian National Bank from Paris. Records uncovered by investigators show that it made no investments in Haitian businesses and charged fees on almost every transaction made by the Haitian government.
At one point, Haiti earmarked about half of its largest source of revenue – coffee taxes – to pay the C.I.C. and its investors in the National Bank.
Parisian financiers also used their allies in the French government to pressure Haiti not to disrupt the bank’s operations, the New York Times reported, citing diplomatic correspondence.
“It was a very nice demonstration of the links between the financial, military and political powers in France at the end of the 19th century,” Nicolas Théry acknowledged, saying it was a very sad illustration of the meaning of colonization and financial colonization.
The president of Crédit Mutuel, Nicolas Théry said he was not aware that the bank owed money to Haiti more than a century after it ended its operations in Haiti. He said the researchers would have a broad mandate to seek out any information on any subject. This, he said, is “a matter of principle for us.