A screenshot of a report from the Samakal website concerning Dr. Muhammad Yunus has recently gone viral on Facebook. The screenshot displays the date “17 August 2025” with the headline: “Dr. Yunus evaded Tk 11 billion in taxes: NBR.” It is being claimed that the report was published on 17 August 2025. This framing suggests that after Dr. Yunus assumed the position of Chief Adviser to the caretaker government, the National Board of Revenue (NBR) published information implicating him in tax evasion. However, an investigation by FactWatch reveals that the original report was published on 7 May 2023, and the screenshot was captured in a manner that omits the actual publication date. Based on this, FactWatch has classified the circulating posts as misleading.

To verify the authenticity of the screenshot, FactWatch conducted keyword searches which led to the original report on Samakal’s official website, where the publication date is confirmed as “07 May 2023.” The “17 August 2025” date corresponds to the date on which the archived version of the report was accessed, not when it was originally published. Analysis shows that the screenshot was taken while omitting the publication date, thereby misrepresenting the timeline. A comparison of two screenshots provides visual evidence of this discrepancy.

While preparing this report, the FactWatch team accessed the Samakal article on “18 August 2025.” As a result, in their screenshot, the date appears as “18 August 2025” instead of “17 August 2025.”

Notably, the NBR filed a case against Dr. Muhammad Yunus in the High Court on 7 May 2023. He was accused of evading Tk 11 billion in taxes during the period from 2012 to 2017. At the time, the prosecution claimed that government dues for those fiscal years included Tk 5.77 billion from Grameen Kalyan, Tk 3.55 billion from another Grameen Kalyan account, and Tk 2.15 billion from Grameen Telecom. The tax demand across these five fiscal years amounted to Tk 6.66 billion. This case was later withdrawn by the High Court on 3 October 2024.

It is evident that this issue is not recent, and the Samakal report has been misrepresented. Furthermore, no evidence has been found indicating that the NBR filed any tax evasion case against the Chief Adviser on 17 August 2025. Therefore, FactWatch considers the circulated posts to be misleading.

Original News Source: https://www.fact-watch.org/dr-muhammad-yunus-3/