Saima Wazed resigns as WHO South-East Asia director after fraud inquiries

Saima Wazed resigned on Wednesday as World Health Organization Regional Director for South-East Asia, the post she won in 2024 for a five-year term. Reuters saw the resignation letter to Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. It took effect at once. WHO is due to start the election for a replacement next month, a person familiar with the process said.

Wazed, 53, is the daughter of Sheikh Hasina, the former Bangladesh prime minister who left office in 2024. The regional office is in New Delhi and covers 11 countries. She was first sent on leave in July 2025 after Bangladesh's Anti-Corruption Commission, working under the interim government of Muhammad Yunus, filed fraud and forgery cases against her. WHO later moved her to unpaid administrative leave, where she stayed into 2026.

The agency's charges, set out in a 3 July 2026 letter from her lawyers that Reuters also saw, are specific. WHO accused her of financial fraud on travel to China and of misrepresenting her academic credentials. The resignation letter adds a third count that WHO put to her: that she acquired a plot of land in Bangladesh illegally. Wazed has denied all three.

On the land, she wrote that she obtained the plot before she joined WHO and that she was entitled to it under a Bangladeshi law covering the family of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina's father and the country's independence leader. On the wider case she told The Indian Express that Tedros had harassed and intimidated her, blocked her request for an investigation into his own conduct, and left her on leave without pay as retaliation. "It was becoming mentally and financially impossible for me to cope," she said.

The resignation letter is colder. "I was elected to the position of Regional Director in order to serve the countries in my region, which I had sincerely done," she wrote. "Since you continue to prevent me from effectively carrying out my duties, I have lost all trust and confidence in your leadership of WHO." After nearly a year without pay, she said the finances no longer worked.

The politics sit just behind the personnel file. Hasina's government collapsed in 2024. The Yunus interim administration has pursued corruption cases against her family. Wazed's WHO election in 2024 was already contested by governments that saw it as a Hasina-era appointment. Once Dhaka filed charges, the UN health agency had a member-state problem and an internal integrity problem at the same time.

WHO has not published a full charge sheet. It has not said whether the China travel file, the credentials file or the land file will continue after her resignation. An unpaid leave that lasts a year is itself a finding of sorts: the organisation was not prepared to put her back in the chair and not yet prepared to finish a public process. Her exit solves the vacancy. It does not close the inquiries in Geneva or in Dhaka.

South-East Asia is WHO's most populous region. The director's job covers disease surveillance, vaccine programmes and national health systems from Indonesia to India. The office has been running without a sitting elected director since mid-2025. Member states will now vote on a successor on a compressed timetable. Wazed leaves denying every count and naming the Director-General as the reason she walked.