According to attorneys, Bangladesh’s highest court has ordered Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate and father of microfinance, to pay more than $1 million in taxes on a $7 million donation he made to three charity trusts.
With his groundbreaking micro-credit bank, Yunus, 83, often known as the Banker of the Poor, is credited with helping millions of people escape poverty. However, he has a falling out with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who claims he is “sucking blood” from the underprivileged.
He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 in recognition of his efforts to advance economic growth.
Yunus’ attorney Sarder Jinnat Ali told AFP that “The Supreme Court… dismissed our case.”
The court, which affirmed a lower court’s ruling, decided on Sunday that Yunus must pay since the law forbids tax exemptions for gifts made to trusts.
Between 2011 and 2014, Yunus gave 767 million taka ($7 million) to the Yunus Centre, the Yunus Family Trust, and the Professor Muhammad Yunus Trust.
He must pay a total tax bill of 150 million taka ($1.4 million) to the court, of which he has already paid 30 million taka.
Through the Grameen Bank, which he started in the 1980s, Yunus is credited with helping to end extreme poverty in Bangladesh by providing microloans to tens of millions of rural women.
Yunus is the chairman of several companies, and this year Bangladesh’s anti-graft body requested a thorough investigation into those companies. Hasina has since attacked Yunus personally, blaming him for the World Bank’s decision to abandon a bridge project that was beset by corruption suspicions.
In June of last year, when the bridge near Dhaka eventually opened, Hasina declared Yunus should be “dipped in a river” for endangering its construction.
40 influential people from around the world, including former UN leader Ban Ki-moon and former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, published a letter in March pleading with Bangladesh to halt their “unfair” attacks and harassment of Yunus.
