Fleet National Bank v. Clark

OPINION

FLANDERS, Justice.

This case requires us to determine whether certain offshore commercial-bank deposits were exempt from Rhode Island’s bank-deposits tax during the tax years ending November 1986 through 1988. The deposits in question were located at a Grand Cayman branch of the respondent Fleet National Bank (Fleet), which was then a Providence-based banking institution. These types of deposits were known as Eurodollar time deposits (Eurodollar deposits or Cayman deposits). 1 Historically Fleet had offered such deposits to its high-end commercial-banking customers as a riskier but…