Who is the interim leader of Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus?
Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus speaks to the media after he was granted bail by a court in an embezzlement case, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Sunday, Mar 3, 2024. (Photo: AP/Mahmud Hossain Opu)
Bangladesh's prime minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country on Monday (Aug 5) following weeks of deadly protests.
They began as student-led demonstrations against government job quotas.
But they quickly surged into a movement demanding both Hasina’s resignation and that her arch rival, a Nobel Prize winner named Muhammad Yunus, helm an interim government.
Yunus has accepted the request, but what do we know about him?
"BANKER TO THE POOR"
Yunus has been called the "banker to the poor" and a pioneer of the global microcredit movement.
Microcredit lending is the idea of extending small loans to very poor people - often small business owners.
Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for helping lift millions from poverty by providing microloans to Bangladesh's rural poor.
Their lending model has since inspired similar projects around the world and Yunus started Grameen America, focused on US women living in poverty, in 2008.
HASINA'S FOE
As his success grew Yunus flirted briefly with a political career and attempted to form his own party in 2007.
His ambitions were widely viewed as having sparked Hasina’s ire, who accused him of "sucking blood from the poor".
His critics have also said his microlenders charge excessive rates and make money off the poor, but Yunus said the rates were far lower than local interest rates in developing countries.
Hasina's government removed him as head of Grameen Bank in 2011, saying that at 73, he had stayed on past the legal retirement age of 60.
Thousands of Bangladeshis formed a human chain to protest his ouster.
LEGAL WOES
Yunus was already in the spotlight this year facing a slew of legal troubles.
He was sentenced in January to six months in prison for labour law violations.
Then in June, he and 13 others were indicted on charges of embezzlement from the workers' welfare fund of a telecoms company he founded.
The same month, Yunus discussed his legal troubles in an interview with Reuters.
“The cases are very flimsy, made-up stories. They've stolen money, forgery, embezzlement, cheating the rights of, cheating the labour, not giving them their proper money that they deserve.”
Though he was ultimately not jailed in either of those cases, Yunus still faces more than 100 other cases on graft and other charges.
In the June interview, Yunus was also openly critical of Hasina and the state of Bangladeshi politics.
“Bangladesh doesn't have any politics left. There's only one party who is active and occupy everything, do everything, get to the elections in their way.”
Following Hasina's exit, Yunus told Indian broadcaster Times Now that Monday marked the "second liberation day" for Bangladesh after its 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.
