Norway's speaker of parliament yesterday sided with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus in a dispute pitting him against Norwegian telecoms operator Telenor over control of their

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Bangladeshi joint venture in GrameenPhone.

The leading mobile phone company in Bangladesh with more than 10 million subscribers, GrameenPhone is 62 percent owned by Norway's state-controlled Telenor and 38 percent by Grameen Bank, founded by Yunus in 1983 to provide micro-credit to his nation's poorest citizens.

Yunus claims that Telenor has violated their 1996 agreement under which the Norwegian group was to cede control of GrameenPhone within six years, but now refuses to do so.

Telenor argues that the agreement was merely a declaration of intent and was not binding.

"If we could reach a solution that the two sides could agree on, that would be a big breakthrough for Yunus' philosophy," Norway's speaker of parliament Thorbjoern Jagland told daily Dagbladet yesterday.

"After all it is the poor women of Bangladesh who made Grameen Bank and this telecoms company what they are," he said.

During his Nobel lecture on Sunday, when he received the Peace Prize at a ceremony in oslo, Yunus said the aim was to make GrameenPhone "a social business by giving majority ownership to the

poor women of Grameen Bank."

"Someday GrameenPhone will become another example of a big enterprise owned by the poor," he said to loud applause from the audience, which included Telenor chief executive Jon Fredrik Baksaas.

GrameenPhone is a highly profitable unit for Telenor. The company (Telenor) claims it has acted in a socially responsible way by investing heavily in the developing country.

SWEDISH KING CROWNS NOBEL WINNERS

AFP reports from Stockholm: Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustav handed gold medals and diplomas to this year's Nobel laureates for literature, economics and the sciences on Sunday, with US winners scooping all but one of the honours.

Turkish novelist orhan Pamuk was the only non-American on the all-male list of winners at the ceremony in Stockholm, taking the literature prize.

The prize for chemistry went to Roger Kornberg of the US. He attended his first Nobel ceremony in 1959, aged 12, when his father Arthur received the Nobel prize for medicine. Arthur Kornberg duly accompanied his son at Sunday's prize-giving.

John Mather and George Smoot shared the prize for physics for their work on the origins of the universe, while the medicine award was also shared, this time by the geneticists Andrew Fire and George Mello.

The other US laureate was Edmund Phelps, who received the Nobel Prize for Economics for his research on inflation and growth.

As well as the medals and diplomas handed over by the king, each prize bears a cheque worth 1.1 million euros (1.45 million dollars), which is split in the case of joint winners.

Earlier on Sunday, the pioneering Bangladeshi micro-credit banker Prof Muhammad Yunus received the Peace Prize at a ceremony in oslo, where the Norwegian Nobel Committee which allocates that prize is based.

The award ceremonies are held on the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the scientist and industrialist who set up the prizes in his will.

The Stockholm ceremony was due to be followed by a gala dinner and ball in the town hall, attended by members of the royal family and the Swedish government.