Indigenous Canadian communities protesting against the Royal Bank of Scotland's link to oil extraction have attended the bank's AGM.

Three Canadian First Nations representatives were able to put their questions to the board by attending as proxies for RBS shareholders.

The group also held a protest outside the bank's Gogarburn headquarters in Edinburgh where they were joined by other demonstrators focusing on the "dirty finance" of tar sands projects in Alberta, Canada.

RBS has lent £5.6bn in corporate financing to companies involved in Alberta's tar sands extraction and pipeline development since being bailed out in 2008, according to research by a coalition of environmental groups.

Protesters from Friends of the Earth Scotland, Platform and the World Development Movement were dressed as bankers and pretended to drink from oil cans as board members arrived for the general meeting.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, representing the Indigenous Environmental Network, said they were using the meeting to call on the bank to stop financing tar sands companies.

He said: "Banks in Canada and in the US have been put on notice for their dirty finance of the Canadian tar sands which is resulting in the destruction of First Nations Peoples' way of life.

"The UK's RBS, being a majority publicly-owned bank, should be under the greatest scrutiny for its involvement in financing the Canadian tar sands and more specifically the Enbridge Pipeline corporation and its controversial proposed Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline."

The proposed Enbridge pipeline would pass through the territories of 80 First Nations, according to the campaign.

Mr Clayton Thomas-Muller said: "A catastrophic human rights situation is rolling out in local communities who are suffering extremely high cancer rates, loss of natural habitat and loss of food security as well as water security and air quality."

Mel Evans, a researcher with the Platform group, joined around 20 other protesters today.

She said: "We've been tracking RBS finance in fossil fuel projects around the world for five years and we are here to ask them some very important questions.

"We want to know why they have failed to produce actual policies which limit their finance for coal projects or tar sands projects globally.

"RBS have produced all kinds of smoke and mirrors around their finance of fossil fuels and we're still waiting to see an actual policy."