New Delhi: Bangladesh’s apex court has ordered Nobel laureate and microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus to pay over $1 million in taxes on a $7 million donation made to three charitable trusts between 2011-2014, his lawyers said on Monday.Yunus is credited with lifting millions out of poverty through his microcredit bank and won the 2006 Noble peace prize for promoting economic development in his country, the Straits Times reported.The top court, upholding the decision of a lower court, ruled on Sunday that Yunus must pay taxes as the law does not provide exemptions for donations to trusts. The donations totaling 767 million taka ($9.4 million) were made to the Professor Muhammad Yunus Trust, the Yunus Family Trust, and the Yunus Centre between 2011 and 2014. The court ordered him to pay a total tax of 150 million taka, of which he has already paid 30 million taka, the report said.Yunus’ work in helping eradicate extreme poverty in Bangladesh was accomplished by providing microfinance loans to millions of rural women through the Grameen Bank, which he founded in the 1980s.Last year, Bangladesh’s anti-graft watchdog initiated an investigation into firms chaired by Yunus. Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina also accused him of “sucking blood from the poor” and held him responsible for the World Bank’s withdrawal from a bridge project amid corruption allegations.When the Padma bridge near Dhaka eventually opened in June 2022, Hasina remarked that Yunus should be “dipped in a river” for endangering its completion, the report said.In March 2023, 40 global figures, including former UN chief Ban Ki-moon and former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, published a joint letter urging Bangladesh to cease “unfair” attacks and harassment targeted at Yunus.