The detained deputy governor of Myanmar’s Central Bank, Dr. Bo Bo Nge, has been awarded the 2025 Laszlo Z. Bito Award for Humanitarian Service by Bard College, where he earned his BA.
The award “honors individuals resisting injustice, violence, and authoritarian threats” and “recognizes U Bo Bo Nge’s ongoing struggle as a political prisoner fighting for democracy and freedom in Myanmar,” according to the award committee.
Dr. Bo Bo Nge served as deputy governor of the Central Bank under the National League for Democracy (NLD) government but was arrested on Feb. 11, 2021 following the military coup.
In 2022, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison under Section 55 of the Anti-Corruption Law on charges widely seen as politically motivated.
The junta-appointed Anti-Corruption Commission alleged he was responsible for the loss of millions of kyats from the government budget by supervising banking transactions, permits, and stamp duties. It also accused him of corruption in transactions with Open Society Myanmar (OSM), a non-profit founded by U.S. billionaire George Soros.
Dr. Bo Bo Nge was a member of the economic committee of the NLD. In 2017, he was appointed deputy governor of the bank, where he took a leading role in facilitating financial and economic reforms.
Australian economist Sean Turnell, an economic adviser to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi who worked with Dr. Bo Bo Nge on the reforms, said of his sentence in 2022: “What a profound injustice! A travesty! Bo Bo [Nge] is utterly incorruptible.”
He had also been jailed by the previous military regime for student activism during the 1988 pro-democracy uprising.
While behind bars, he learned English from a dictionary smuggled into the prison. After his release, he fled to the United States, where he took up a scholarship at Bard College before studying for a master’s in economics at Johns Hopkins University. He specialized in financial reform and gained a doctorate from London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
The Washington Post described his life as an American immigrant success story, noting that he rose from washing dishes to become an economist earning a six-figure salary.
But he chose to return to his homeland after the NLD government took power in 2016 to help with Myanmar’s democratic transition.
Writing on Facebook after the award was announced, Turnell called his former colleague “Myanmar’s bravest and greatest economic reformer,” adding that the deputy governor “languishes in prison in Myanmar precisely because of his integrity and courage.”
