'Banker to the poor' Muhammad Yunus faces jail in Bangladesh
Nobel Peace laureate and microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus faces prison in Bangladesh over charges he says are politically motivated.
A Nobel peace laureate known globally as the “banker to the poor” could be imprisoned in his home country of Bangladesh as he faces a slew of legal charges that he says are politically motivated.
Muhammad Yunus, who received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering the use of microcredit to alleviate poverty, was convicted in January of violating Bangladesh’s labor laws and sentenced to six months in prison along with three other officials at his telecommunications company.
An appeal hearing on Sunday could see their bail revoked, and Yunus could face even longer sentences if convicted of almost 200 other charges including corruption, tax evasion and money laundering.
Nobel Peace Prize laureat, Mohammad Yunus in Paris in 2008.Haley / SIPA via AP fileYunus, 83, denied all charges, and along with supporters around the world, he says the government of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is engaged in a campaign of judicial harassment against him.
“She hates me to the core,” Yunus told NBC News in a Zoom interview Thursday from the South Asian nation’s capital, Dhaka. “I don’t know why it happened that way.”
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