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Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus â€œsackedâ€as head of Grameen Bank

03 March 2011 00:25 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Mohammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s Nobel laureate has been ordered to step down as head of the microfinance Grameen Bank he founded following a long-running dispute with the country’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina, APA reports quoting â€œThe Telegraphâ€.
The 70-year-old was ordered out by Bangladesh’s central bank who argued that he violated the country’s retirement laws by staying on past the mandatory retirement age of 60.
His removal was yesterday disputed by Grameen however, who said it was taking legal advice at that Prof Yunus remains at the helm.
Professor Yunus has been locked in a dispute with the government since November last year when a documentary claimed he had misused aid funds from the Norwegian government.
Oslo’s aid minister later issued a statement denying there had been any wrongdoing, but the Bangladesh government pressed on with an inquiry into the running of the bank.
In December Miss Hasina said Grameen Bank had been "sucking money out of the people after giving them loans".
The government’s hostility to Prof Yunus sparked an international campaign to protect its independence and the Nobel-winner’s stewardship, against what it regarded as an attempted government takeover.
His allies include Bill Clinton, the former US president.
According to diplomats in Dhaka, Professor Yunus’s international standing and his brief flirtation with a political career in 2007 had angered Miss Hasina.
Since its creation in 1983, Grameen has given loans to millions of some of the world’s poorest people, and today has more than eight million borrowers and gives $1 billion in loans every year. Prof Yunus was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 2006.
Yesterday Grameen said it had "complied with the law in respect of appointment of the managing director".
"According to the bank’s legal advisers, the founder of Grameen Bank, Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus, is accordingly continuing in his office", it added.
Last month Prof Yunus told The Sunday Telegraph he feared a government takeover could lead to political misuse of the bank’s funds and a crisis of confidence among the bank’s eight million lenders and savers. He was not against standing down, he said, but first wanted assurances that the government would respect the bank’s independence.