By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court on Friday scheduled a March 31 hearing on petitions filed by former prime minister Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, seeking to suspend their prison sentences in a major corruption case involving £190 million.
According to the court’s cause list, a two-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Sardar Muhammad Sarfraz Dogar and including Justice Muhammad Asif will take up the appeals against convictions handed down in January by an accountability court in Islamabad. That court sentenced Khan to 14 years in prison and Bushra Bibi to seven years in the case, which is also known as the Al-Qadir Trust graft matter.
The petitions have encountered repeated procedural delays. At the most recent hearing on March 11, the high court criticized the National Accountability Bureau for what it described as “delaying tactics” and imposed a fine of 100,000 rupees on the anti-graft agency. The court ordered the bureau to come fully prepared for the next hearing and directed it to avoid further postponements. Defense lawyers pressed for an early resolution, urging the court to decide the matter before the Eid holidays.
A subsequent written order issued by the court omitted any reference to the fine, though it repeated the directive for the bureau to appear ready. Earlier in the process, the high court registrar’s office had raised technical objections to the petitions, citing unsigned pages and the lack of a certificate confirming that the matter was not pending elsewhere. Those objections were cleared on Feb. 26 after defense counsel highlighted Khan’s medical condition and pressed for an expedited date.
The case stems from allegations tied to the Al-Qadir Trust and has been one of several legal proceedings that have kept Khan, the founder of the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, behind bars since his initial conviction. On the same day, March 31, the Supreme Court is scheduled to resume hearings on a separate set of appeals filed by Khan in a long-running defamation lawsuit brought against him by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
A three-member bench headed by Justice Muhammad Hashim Khan Kakar, and including Justices Ishtiaq Ibrahim and Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb, will take up the matter. The court had previously heard arguments in the case on Feb. 8.The defamation suit dates to July 7, 2017, when Sharif — then in opposition — filed a civil claim seeking damages over statements Khan made during a televised interview and a subsequent public rally. In those remarks, Khan alleged that he had been offered a bribe of 10 billion rupees to drop pressure on the Panama Papers corruption case then pending against Nawaz Sharif, who was prime minister at the time.
Khan later asked the Lahore High Court to add the Punjab provincial government, through its law department secretary, as a respondent in the case. On April 23, 2025, the Lahore High Court rejected that request, ruling that the dispute was strictly between two private parties — Sharif as plaintiff and Khan as defendant — and that the Punjab law department had no direct stake in the litigation. The high court also dismissed a related request to issue formal notice to Sharif, noting that the underlying suit remained at the preliminary motion stage.
Separately, Khan had filed an application under Section 13 of the Defamation Ordinance of 2002, asking that the matter be transferred from an additional district judge in Lahore — a court he argued was inferior to the district court — for a fresh trial before the district judge. That application was also turned down, and the Supreme Court will now hear the appeal of both rulings.
The Supreme Court proceedings on March 31 are distinct from a parallel defamation matter involving the same 10 billion rupee claim. In that separate track, a different three-judge Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Ayesha Malik stayed trial-court proceedings on Feb. 21 after considering review petitions filed by Khan. That bench also issued notice to Sharif.
The broader defamation litigation has already produced significant procedural rulings. In October and November 2022, a trial court in Lahore dismissed Khan’s objections to interrogatories submitted by Sharif and later struck out Khan’s right to present a defense after he failed to answer them. The Lahore High Court upheld those decisions, and on Feb. 21, 2023, the Supreme Court affirmed them in a 2-to-1 majority judgment authored by Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah. The court described Khan’s conduct during the trial proceedings as “wilfully contumacious and disobedient” and found no illegality in the trial court’s decision to close his defense.
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