Written by Roma Paul and Sudipto Ganguly
DHAKA (Reuters) – Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer of the global microcredit movement who could lead Bangladesh’s new interim government, was a bitter enemy of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who resigned and fled the country.
Known as the “banker to the poor,” Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for helping lift millions of people out of poverty by providing small loans of less than $100 to poor rural people who had become too poor to access traditional banks.
Their lending model has since inspired similar projects around the world, including in developed countries like the United States, where Yunus founded the nonprofit Grameen America.
As his success grew, Yunus, now 84, briefly flirted with politics, trying to form his own party in 2007. But his ambitions were widely seen as a spark that ignited Hasina’s wrath, who accused him of “sucking the blood of the poor.”
Critics in Bangladesh and other countries, including neighboring India, have said the microlenders charge exorbitant interest rates and exploit the poor for profit. But Yunus said the rates are far lower than local interest rates in developing countries or the 300 percent or more that loan sharks sometimes charge.
In 2011, Hasina’s government removed him from his post as chairman of Grameen Bank, saying that although he was 73, he had been in office beyond the legal retirement age of 60. Thousands of Bangladeshis formed a human chain to protest his removal.
In January this year, Yunus was sentenced to six months in prison for violating labour laws. A Bangladeshi court in June charged him and 13 others with embezzling 252.2 million taka ($2 million) from a workers’ welfare fund at a telecom company he founded.
Although he was not jailed in either case, Younes faces more than 100 other corruption and other charges. Younes denies any involvement in those cases, telling Reuters in an interview that the allegations against him were “very flimsy and fabricated stories.”
In June, Yunus criticised Hasina, saying: “There is no more political activity in Bangladesh. There is only one active party that occupies everything, does everything, and reaches the elections in its own way.”
Monday marks Bangladesh’s “second Liberation Day” after the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan following Hasina’s exit, he told India’s Times Now.
Yunus’s spokesman said he was currently in Paris undergoing a minor medical procedure, adding that he had accepted a request from students who led the campaign against Hasina to be the chief adviser to the interim government.
Yunus was an economist studying at Chittagong University when famine struck Bangladesh in 1974, killing hundreds of thousands of people and leaving him searching for better ways to help his country’s vast rural population.
The opportunity arose when Yunus met a woman in a village near the university who had taken out a loan from a moneylender. The amount was less than a dollar, but in return the moneylender had the exclusive right to buy everything the woman produced at a price he set himself.
“For me, this was a way of recruiting slave labor,” Yunus said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He found 42 people who would borrow $27 from a moneylender and lent them the money himself—the success of which motivated him to do more and to think of credit as a basic human right.
“When I gave out loans, I was amazed at the results I got. The poor people paid back the loans on time every time.”
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