Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi pioneer of “microfinance” loans to help the poor, lodged a Supreme Court appeal yesterday against an order sacking him from his own bank.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate has also asked the court to immediately suspend the central bank’s order removing him from Grameen Bank, which he founded in 1983 and which provides collateral-free loans to 8 million rural borrowers.
Yunus, 70, who is celebrated worldwide for tackling poverty through microfinance cash loans, has fallen out with Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and his supporters say he has been targeted in a bitter smear campaign.
He was fired as Grameen Bank managing director last week by order of the central bank, and on Tuesday he lost a High Court appeal against his dismissal.
Backed by a high-profile international lobby group, he defied the order by returning to work at Grameen’s headquarters and launching his legal battle.
“The appeal has been submitted at the Supreme Court seeking a stay on the High Court verdict and challenging the central bank order that removed him from his post,” said Tanim Hussain Shawon, one of Yunus’ lawyers.
A preliminary hearing was to be held yesterday at the offices of a Supreme Court judge, Shawon said, adding that the appeal had been lodged by both Yunus and the nine elected members of Grameen’s board of directors.
The central bank — which is nominally independent from the government — removed Yunus on the basis that he had been in his position illegally since failing to seek its approval when he was reappointed indefinitely in 1999.
High Court judge Muhammad Mamtaj Uddin Ahmed said in his ruling on Tuesday that it was “crystal clear” the central bank’s order was legal and added that Yunus had also exceeded Grameen Bank’s mandatory retirement age of 60.
Analysts say Yunus’ troubles stem from 2007, when he floated the idea of forming a political party, earning the wrath of Hasina, who has publicly disparaged his work.
Grameen’s huge influence in Bangladesh and its move into solar panels, mobile phones and other consumer goods also appear to have triggered the government’s animosity.
“They want to put their own person at the chair of the bank, a political person,” Yunus, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2006, told a Washington microfinance conference via video link late on Monday.
Friends of Grameen, a lobby group chaired by former Irish president Mary Robinson, described the High Court verdict as “politically oriented and without legal grounds.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited