Cana­da's Sco­tia­bank an­nounced in Toron­to yes­ter­day that it would close 35 of its over 200 branch­es in the Caribbean and that it would sev­er 1,500 full-time em­ploy­ees, in­clud­ing 500 in its in­ter­na­tion­al op­er­a­tions.In a news re­lease, Sco­tia­bank said it ex­pect­ed to record cer­tain charges in its fis­cal 2014 fourth quar­ter earn­ings, ag­gre­gat­ing to a to­tal of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $451 mil­lion pre-tax.

Of the Caribbean, Sco­tia­bank said: "Due to the pro­longed eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery and con­tin­ued un­cer­tain out­look, these ad­di­tion­al amounts bring the net car­ry­ing val­ue in line with the ex­pect­ed net re­cov­er­able val­ue."The bank said it had start­ed re­struc­tur­ing ini­tia­tives "in or­der to im­prove the speed and qual­i­ty of ser­vice it pro­vides its cus­tomers, to re­duce costs in a sus­tain­able man­ner, and to achieve greater op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cies.

"The bank in­tends to record a re­struc­tur­ing pro­vi­sion of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $148 mil­lion in the fourth quar­ter. The ma­jor­i­ty of the re­struc­tur­ing pro­vi­sion re­lates to em­ploy­ee sev­er­ance charges in the bank's Cana­di­an bank­ing and in­ter­na­tion­al bank­ing di­vi­sions and will af­fect peo­ple at all lev­els of the or­gan­i­sa­tion."

The state­ment said "in in­ter­na­tion­al bank­ing, the charges are pri­mar­i­ly for clos­ing or down­siz­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 120 branch­es, which will al­low us to fo­cus on high-growth mar­kets, min­imise branch over­lap, and re­alise syn­er­gies re­sult­ing from re­cent ac­qui­si­tions."In a con­fer­ence call, Bri­an Porter, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of Sco­tia, said of 120 branch­es to be closed across the bank's net­work, 35 would be shut­tered in Mex­i­co and "about 35" in the Caribbean.

In re­sponse to a ques­tion from a Cana­di­an bank­ing an­a­lyst dur­ing the con­fer­ence call, Porter said: "In some of these (Caribbean) coun­tries, we are just over­branched and we have to size it to the eco­nom­ic re­al­i­ties of these economies."Sco­tia­bank op­er­ates in 21 coun­tries in the re­gion.Sco­tia­bank T&T, which is owned 51 per cent by its Toron­to-based par­ent, was con­tact­ed for com­ment about how the changes would im­pact on T&T, but did not re­spond up to press time.

The bank al­so wrote down the val­ue of its un­remit­ted div­i­dends from a 27 per cent stake of a bank in Venezuela as it "adopt­ed a re­vised ex­change rate."Sco­tia­bank said it an­nounce its year-end and fourth quar­ter re­sults for fis­cal 2014 on De­cem­ber 5.