He also noted that “last year, the Nobel Academy decided to award the Nobel Prize for Peace to Professor Muhammad Yunus, founder of the “Grameen Movement” in Bangladesh, for his ideas to couple micro-credit soft investments with social objectives in order to achieve, through small workers' cooperatives and non profit organisations, economic and social development for poor people in big city areas.

The Nobel winner is a social economy operator, one of yours, and his prize honours the movement”. (To read the full speech of Commissioner Verheugen, click here).