Nobel peace winner wants GrameenPhone control

Oslo, Dec 9: Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus said he still aims to wrest control of Bangladesh's biggest mobile telephone operator GrameenPhone from Norway's Telenor to serve the poor of Bangladesh.

Telenor owns 62 per cent and nonprofit Grameen Telecom, a unit of Yunus' Grameen Bank, owns the rest. But Yunus said that the company was meant to be controlled by Bangladeshis.

''Our idea was ultimately that it would be owned by the poor women of Bangladesh. So we are waiting to make it happen,'' Yunus told reporters yesterday upon arrival in Oslo where he and a Grameen Bank representative will receive the peace prize tomorrow.

''Today we have 38 per cent. We want to have the majority share,'' Yunus said at Oslo's airport.

Yunus and Grameen Bank won the 2006 peace award for their work to lift millions out of poverty by granting tiny loans, pioneering a movement known as ''microcredit,'' which has spread far beyond Bangladesh. The laureates were announced in October.

Telenor has said no agreement exists to hand over control of GrameenPhone to Grameen Telecom, and it says it has ploughed almost all the profits back into the company to the good of the country.

GrameenPhone was created a decade ago and now has 10 million subscribers and more than 60 percent of the Bangladesh mobile phone market. Telenor considers it a great success.

As part of the bank's microcredit scheme, GrameenPhone has distributed around 260,000 ''village phones,'' mainly to women operators who use them to provide telecom service in poor rural Bangladesh and earn income from it for themselves.

Yunus, an economist who has won the nickname ''Banker to the Poor,'' said he believed poverty can be eradicated altogether.

''Basically we can leave poverty behind and clear the world of poverty completely .... If we can make up our minds we can do it,'' he said.

Reuters