Sheikh Hasina’s Daughter Resigns as Top WHO Director After Corruption Conviction in Bangladesh
by Jerome London · Thought CatalogUpdated 7 minutes ago, September 11, 2026
Saima Wazed, the daughter of ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, has stepped down from one of the World Health Organization’s most senior regional posts, closing out a term shadowed by a corruption conviction back home and accusations that she faked her credentials to win the job.
Wazed resigned September 9 in a letter to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, walking away from a five-year term she’d held since early 2024 as Regional Director for South-East Asia, a region of more than 2 billion people. The day before, WHO’s Regional Committee met behind closed doors and recommended terminating her outright.
She’d been on unpaid administrative leave since July 2025. In the letter she wrote that Tedros kept preventing her from doing her job, that she’d lost all trust in his leadership, and that nearly a year without pay had made her finances untenable.
The case against her runs in two tracks. In Bangladesh, a Dhaka court convicted her in absentia last November in the Purbachal land-allocation cases, handing her 5 years and a fine for abuse of power to obtain plots in a diplomatic-zone project. Her mother, ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and her brother were convicted in the same proceedings. Separate Anti-Corruption Commission cases accuse her of providing false academic information to land the WHO post and of funneling roughly Tk 33 crore, about $2.8 million, in bank funds to her Shuchona Foundation.
At WHO, investigators accused her of misrepresenting academic credentials and of financial fraud tied to travel to China. Her lawyers say the “fraud” was a $901 reimbursement processed in error by a junior staffer for a trip she never took because she fell ill.
Wazed denies the core charges. She says she was transparent with Tedros about her honorary doctorate, that she cooperated fully with the investigation, and that she’s being scapegoated because she’s Hasina’s daughter. She has not returned to Bangladesh to face the proceedings; the 5-year sentence stands in absentia.
WHO says the matter was handled under its rules with due process. Dr Nilesh Buddha remains officer-in-charge, with an election for a successor targeted for January 2027.
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