Oslo: Norway's international development
minister has deplored the sacking of Nobel Peace Prize winner
Muhammad Yunus from the celebrated microfinance lender he
founded.
"This is a very sad development. What we see is a
brutal internal power struggle in Bangladesh. Yunus was a
popular person, both at home and abroad, and that always leads
to opponents," Erik Solheim told news agency NTB, .
Yunus, the talismanic 70-year-old leader of Grameen
Bank, earned the enmity of Bangladesh's prime minister Sheikh
Hasina four years ago and an increasingly vicious power
struggle has since ensued between the company and the
government.
It culminated yesterday with Yunus being relieved of
his duties "with immediate effect," Muzammel Huq, the
government-appointed chairman of the Bangladesh central bank
told AFP.
Grameen pioneered micro-lending in the 1980s in which
small amounts of money were lent to mostly poor and rural
entrepreneurs, catapulting Yunus to international fame and his
Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
PTI
First Published: Thursday, March 03, 2011, 11:33