In so many ways, the success story of Mr Muhammed Aziz Khan, chairman of Summit Group, Bangladesh's largest infrastructure conglomerate, is interwoven with the modern history of his country.

Soon after gaining independence from Britain in 1947 amid the blood-soaked Partition of India, as the eastern wing of new country Pakistan, Bengali nationalism began asserting itself against the western twin - separated by the Indian heartland in the middle. A series of missteps by Islamabad and increasing repression of Bengalis by the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani armed forces set the stage for a liberation movement that, in 1971, saw East Pakistan morphing into the new nation of Bangladesh.