Employees of Grameen Bank take part in a sit-in protest in front of their central office in Dhaka yesterday

Bangladesh’s Nobel laureate Muhammed Yunus told staff at his microfinance bank yesterday that “it is my time to leave” after he lost a Supreme Court appeal against his sacking, a colleague said.
Yunus spoke to hundreds of staff at Grameen Bank, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Yunus in 2006, who had stopped work after hearing about the verdict, Grameen Bank official Amimul Islam told AFP.
“Yunus said ‘I went to court to seek justice, but now I have received the verdict and it is my time to leave Grameen Bank,’” Islam told AFP at the Grameen Bank headquarters in Dhaka’s Mirpur district.
“He said ‘I wanted to leave earlier, but you all requested I stay so I did, but now it is time to leave,’” Islam recounted.
Yunus pulled out of a planned press conference, according to his spokesman.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed Yunus’s final appeal against a central bank order sacking him from Grameen, which has already been upheld by the High Court.
Having exhausted his personal legal options, Yunus’s only hope now resides in a separate legal case lodged by nine Grameen Bank board members in the Supreme Court that also seeks his reinstatement.
The case may be heard today, lawyers said, but few observers expect it to be successful. AFP