>>1079409
Great find. Some notable quotes:
* Islami Bank has been of interest to the government chiefly for its association with the Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s biggest Islamist party…Although the party only holds a minority stake in the bank, quiescent shareholders from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had allowed it to appoint the top management.
* A special court set up by the ruling Awami League party in 2010 convicted most of the Jamaat’s senior leadership of war crimes. Those found guilty were jailed or hanged.
* A charity tied to the Jamaat…runs 19 hospitals
* The shareholders from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were kept in the dark about the boardroom coup, and complained bitterly about it.
Additionally (from wiki), regarding Grameen Bank, which was established in Bangladesh in the 1980s by 2006 Nobel Peace Price Winner Muhammad Yunus:
* The Grameen Bank is a microfinance organisation and community development bank founded in Bangladesh. It makes small loans (known as microcredit or "grameencredit") to the impoverished without requiring collateral.
* It targets the poorest of the poor, with a particular emphasis on women, who receive 95 percent of the bank's loans. 97% of the borrowers were women.
* Some analysts have suggested that microcredit can bring communities into debt from which they cannot escape. Researchers have noted instances when microloans from the Grameen Bank were linked to exploitation and pressures on poor families to sell their belongings, leading in extreme cases to humiliation and ultimately suicides.
* The Norwegian documentary, Caught in Micro debt, said that Grameen evaded taxes. The Spanish documentary, Microcredit, also suggested this. The accusation is based on the unauthorised transfer of approximately US$100 million, donated by The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), from one Grameen entity to another in 1996, before the expiry of the Grameen Bank's tax exemption.
* The Grameen Bank has grown into over two dozen enterprises of the Grameen Family of Enterprises. The Bank and its constituents are together worth over USD 7.4 billion.
* Bankers Ron Grzywinski and Mary Houghton of ShoreBank, a community development bank in Chicago, helped Yunus with the official incorporation of the bank under a grant from the Ford Foundation.
* [ShoreBank] was America's first community development bank, and it has grown into what is, by most accounts, the most successful community development and microfinance institution in the country.
* During its 37 years of operation, ShoreBank played a critical role in stabilizing and rebuilding many of Chicago's low-income neighborhoods and eventually expanded globally, setting the standard for the development finance industry.
* Former President and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton is a prominent supporter of the bank. In 1985, ShoreBank worked closely with Clinton to set up the Southern Development Bancorporation, a community development bank serving rural Arkansans. Clinton described ShoreBank as "the most important bank in America". Its influence in Arkansas influenced Bill Clinton, then governor to propose the Community Development Financial Institutions Act, which he signed in 1994. In addition, ShoreBank executives assisted in the development of the international microfinance industry.
* In 2010 ShoreBank had a troubled asset ratio of 300% compared to a national average for all banks of 15%. The scandal revolves around the banks close ties to President Obama and the unusual circumstances surrounding its rescue effort. In which the bank was recapitalized through loss-share guarantees from the FDIC and a $367.7 million loss taken by the FDIC insurance fund, and nearly $140 million was invested by Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America in the failing bank, there were no other cases in which large banks have lined up to recapitalize a failing bank. The bank faced continued scandal due to the highly unusual nature of the FDIC lawsuit against the bank in which no co-founders, top executives or board members were named.
Of course, who was one of the pioneers of microfinance? Ann Dunham - Barack Hussein Obama's mother:
* To address the problem of poverty in rural villages, she created microcredit programs while working as a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development. Dunham was also employed by the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and she consulted with the Asian Development Bank in Gujranwala, Pakistan. Towards the latter part of her life, she worked with Bank Rakyat Indonesia, where she helped apply her research to the largest microfinance program in the world.
* Peter Geithner, father of Tim Geithner (who later became U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in her son's administration), was head of the foundation's Asia grant-making at that time.