Perhaps after seeing that its baseless attacks against Professor Yunus about the withdrawal of World Bank funding for the Padma Bridge were going nowhere — it is common knowledge that the lost funding was in fact due to government corruption — the ruling party in Bangladesh took up another issue against him: one related to the work of Grameen Telecom, a nonprofit organization that he founded around 25 years ago.
With investigations and legal proceedings underway, the Yunus Centre has stayed publicly silent on this issue. But now, British journalist David Bergman has written a devastating critique of the government’s accusations and attacks related to Grameen Telecom, which Professor Yunus chairs (and for which he receives no financial benefits whatsoever). It is definitely worth checking out if you want to understand what’s going on here.
The article concludes with these words:
There are many people, particularly those linked to the country’s opposition parties, who are or have been held in the Bangladesh jails for no legitimate reason other than for the political convenience of the current government. Its control of the police and the courts provides the authorities with the ability to lock up those people it wishes.
The government cannot do this so easily in relation to Yunus as unlike others he is protected by his Nobel Peace Prize as well as his stellar international reputation. The government will only ever be able to get away with imprisoning Yunus if it had a very strong provable evidence-based rationale, which is absent despite their years of looking.
In the meantime, these current investigations serve to harass and intimidate Yunus, seeking to make him a controversial figure and, in the eyes of the prime minister, less of a threat to her, which is in effect the government’s ultimate objective.
They also possibly serve another purpose. The government (and the Awami League) would no doubt love to get its hand on the the Grameenphone dividends which are given to Grameen Telecom, and these investigations might be part of their attempt to wrest control of them away from the Nobel Peace Prize winner and the other directors of the not-for-profit company.