By Mizan Rahman/Dhaka


The man who was largely behind harassment of Nobel laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus, has finally quit the Grameen Bank (GB) citing “personal reasons”.
The government-appointed Chairman of Grameen Bank, Khondaker Muzammel Huq, has resigned, a finance ministry official said.
Huq submitted his resignation to Finance Minister AMA Muhith and cited personal reasons for his resignation.
Under a media scanner since his appointment following the government’s removal of Dr Muhammad Yunus as the managing director of the Nobel Prize winning microlender, Huq hit newspaper headlines many times for controversial moves that many experts deemed unwarranted and harmful to GB.
In September last year, he formed a five-member committee without consulting the bank’s nine borrower-directors, to appoint a managing director for the GB.
A recent move to advise the government to restructure the most successful microcredit organisation of the country also earned the authorities barrage of flak.
Huq recently kicked up controversy again by saying that an amount of 100bn taka was supposed to be transferred from Grameenphone to Grameen Bank but the money never came.
Before joining GB as chairman, Huq served as managing director of Enterprise Development Company Ltd, a private sector financial organisation.
Earlier between 1982 and 2003, he worked for the GB as a general manager and director for research, training, planning and special programmes. A former research scholar at Oxford University, Muzammel also worked with the Development Bank of France, Central Bank of Sri Lanka and Central Bank of Nepal as adviser on micro-credit and small enterprise development.
Bangladesh had last Tuesday denied that it plans to take control of pioneering microlender Grameen Bank which has liftedmns of people out of poverty.
The statement by a government spokesman came ahead of the release of a report by a commission expected to recommend that the government increase its stake in the Nobel-Prize winning bank to 51% from 25%.
“The government does not have any plan to raise its stake in Grameen Bank from 25% to 51%,” Shahedur Rahman, senior information officer of the finance minister, said.
A preliminary paper by the government-appointed commission, circulated to Bangladesh’s financial experts for discussion, said the government should take majority control of the bank, diluting the ownership rights of its poor borrowers who are also shareholders.
Formal release of the report could come as early as this week.
Some Bangladesh ministers argue the government needs to take control of the bank to increase supervision.
They say the bank has drifted from its original mission of lending to the poor by setting up various firms unrelated to microlending.
Yunus earlier slammed the preliminary commission recommendations as an “extreme abuse of government power”.
The economist, who fell out with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after talking about going into politics, was fired as head of the bank in 2011 for exceeding the mandatory retirement age of 60.
He challenged the move in court but lost.
The court ruled that the bank, established in 1983, was a government institution, not a private bank owned by its lenders, as Yunus and his lawyers have maintained.
In an opinion piece published in Bangladeshi dailies in June, Yunus said the commission’s proposal for the government to take majority control of the bank would be disastrous.
“This is nothing but snatching. Please do not try to snatch the poor people’s bank out of their hands,” Yunus said, comparing the move to “land-grabbing” from the bank’s 8.4mn borrowers who are also its shareholders.
The borrowers are mainly women.
Along with increasing the government’s control of the bank, the commission is also expected to recommend that the institution be split up into 19 separate operations to serve 19 dfferent parts of the country.
Experts fear the proposals, if approved by the government, could jeopardise the future of the bank.
“The suggested structures of the bank will not lead to financial sustainability in future. It is likely to make the institution sick,” Baqui Khalily, a professor of finance said in June.