After a hearing of the Bangladesh government’s Anti-Corruption Commission related to meritless charges against Professor Yunus and 13 of his colleagues, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus made a heartfelt and dignified statement outside the courthouse. You can view and listen to this statement in Bengali here. An English translation of his remarks appears below.
Today, I stand before you with a heavy heart. The Anti-Corruption Commission has levelled accusations of corruption against me: forgery, embezzlement, money laundering, and more.
You, the people of Bangladesh, have known me for a long time, so it’s for you to decide if these charges hold merit, just as you’ve judged me before. I’ve been labelled a usurer, but you’ve rightly seen that I’m not the owner of Grameen Bank. It was Grameen that charged interest to its clients. When I left, 97% of ownership belonged to the bank’s members.
How could I exploit them when I made them owners? They’re still the owners. I was just an employee. You know this about my role.
It has been said that I am the blood-sucker of the poor. I did not create a bank to suck blood from the poor. Rather, I built a bank that 10 million people could become owners of. No one else has made the country’s poor people the owners of bank. This is the truth. They are still the owners today.
Allegations of sabotaging government projects and blocking World Bank funds are recycled claims. It has been said that I should be dunked in the Padma River. These have been stated many times, sometimes in large gatherings attended by many people.
Today, the charges against me revolve around these same stories.
Whether these accusations of deceit and money laundering are justified, I trust your judgement. Do you believe I’d deceive and cheat people to earn money from business? The fairness of our courts is a question for the common people to decide and to judge. The media and the public have the information to discern if I’m guilty of exploiting others for personal gain. I hope and expect that you will come to a fair judgement of my conduct.