Dhaka: A court in northern Mymensingh yesterday granted bail to Nobel Laureate Professor Mohammad Yunus in a defamation suit filed in 2007 by a local politician as he appeared in person, court officials and lawyers said.
A court official reached here by phone told Gulf News that judicial magistrate Rozina Khan granted him the bail against a bond of 5,000 taka (Dh258) following his appearance in the dock to comply with an earlier court order.
"The court also relieved him from his personal appearance as the magistrate set February 20 for the hearing on the case," he said.
Mymensingh unit joint secretary of the left-leaning Jatya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) Nazrul Islam Chunnu filed the case three years ago when Yunus told a foreign news agency that Bangladesh's politics was simply about the "power to make money, having little links with ideals".
Yunus' interview with the French news agency AFP at its Paris headquarters in January 2007 was carried by the Bangladeshi newspapers, prompting Chunnu to file the defamation suit.
A local journalist who witnessed the court proceedings said during his brief appearance that the sexagenarian economist did not speak as his lawyers prepared the papers and arguments for his bail.
He said prosecution lawyers opposed Younus' lawyers' plea for his relief from personal appearance but the magistrate overruled the objection.
Police said several hundred people gathered at the court complex as Yunus appeared there and entered the court room flanked by lawyers, some of them who had accompanied him to Myensingh from Dhaka.
Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize along with his Grameen Bank in 2006 after his experiment in poor men's banking earned Bangladesh the reputation of being the home of microcredit.
The development came a week after the government ordered a "review" of his Grameen Bank's transactions by a five-member expert committee.
