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Bangladesh Prime Minister Says Clinton Personally Pressured Her to Help Foundation Donor

“People in public life shouldn’t be raising money from anybody, anywhere, or for anything”

By Sara A. Carter; Circa:
While secretary of state, Hillary Clinton made a personal call to pressure Bangladesh’s prime minister to aid a donor to her husband’s charitable foundation despite federal ethics laws that require government officials to recuse themselves from matters that could impact their spouse’s business.

The Office of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina confirmed to Circa that Mrs. Clinton called her office in March 2011 to demand that Dr. Muhammed Yunus, a 2006 Nobel Peace prize winner, be restored to his role as chairman of the country’s most famous microcredit bank, Grameen Bank. The bank’s nonprofit Grameen America, which Yunus chairs, has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative.  Grameen Research, which is chaired by Yunus, has donated between $25,000 and $50,000, according to the Clinton Foundation website.

“Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telephoned Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in March 2011 insisting her not to remove Dr. Muhammad Yunus from the post of Managing Director of Grameen Bank,” Deputy Press Secretary Md Nazrul Islam told Circa in an email.

Islam said the prime minister informed Mrs. Clinton that according to Grameen Bank rules and regulations, nobody can hold the position of the Managing Director of Grameen Bank after the age of 60. He was 70 at the time of his removal and had wrangled for months to no avail with the prime minister over his removal.

According to the Bangladesh government, Grameen Bank is part of a statutory body of the government and therefore is subject to the banking laws, saying they told Clinton “Dr. Yunus drew salaries and allowances illegally for 10 years.”

A commission set up by the Bangladesh government also began investigating Grameen Bank in 2012 for financial mismanagement.

Yunus did not return calls seeking comment. But he has long denied any wrongdoing and suggested his ouster was the result of internal politics — he considered creating a rival political party in 2007 but ended up not doing so.

In a 2013 interview, Yunus said he feared his ouster would put the bank he founded to help millions of impoverished people with microcredit — small loans that are often unsecured by assets but have higher interest rates — under too much government control and alter its mission.

“It will be a disaster,” he said at the time. “Everybody in Bangladesh knows that if any business is controlled by the government, it goes down. Now why do they want to do that for the bank?
“Attack me as a person if you don’t like me, but what wrong has the bank done? The bank is owned by the poor women, it is financed with their deposits,” he added. “The bank should be under the control of those women. That’s the way I had always wanted to keep it.”

Mrs. Clinton’s newly disclosed call to reinstate Dr. Yunus marks one of the most direct involvements in an official government matter that impacted one of her husband’s donors. It may trigger new calls for a criminal investigation into the foundation’s activities but “it’s not likely that anything would come of it,” said Richard Painter, former Chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush.

“People in public life shouldn’t be raising money from anybody, anywhere, or for anything,” Painter said. “But until we fix the campaign finance system this is the way it’s going to be.”

Painter, who supported Clinton during her campaign for president, said that there is little if any evidence that she crossed any legal lines regarding the Clinton Foundation. He said favoritism to somebody giving money to campaign is often and frequent in Washington D.C. politics and “if that were the case we’d be investigating the entire U.S. Congress.”

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