ISLAMABAD: A day before the Islamabad High Court was due to take up the main appeals in the £190 million, or Al-Qadir Trust, case, lawyers for former prime minister Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi asked for the hearing to be adjourned, saying they were not authorised to argue the appeals in their current form. In a fresh application, the defence said their engagement had so far been limited to sentence-suspension proceedings and that they had not obtained formal instructions or fresh powers of attorney for the main appeals.
The application, filed by Barrister Salman Safdar along with Salman Akram Raja and Sarmad Muneeb, also complained that Adiala jail authorities had not facilitated meetings with the couple despite repeated efforts by counsel. According to the plea, those meetings were needed to secure instructions and execute the required legal documents before substantive arguments could begin.
That request landed in court after the IHC, on April 30, rejected the couple’s pleas for suspension of sentence and ruled that those applications had effectively become irrelevant once the main appeals were fixed for hearing. The bench, headed by Chief Justice Sardar Muhammad Sarfraz Dogar, then directed that arguments on the principal appeals be heard on May 7 instead.
The case has dragged through months of procedural wrangling. During a hearing on May 1, defence counsel pressed for relief on humanitarian grounds, citing prolonged solitary confinement and an eye infection, while the bench signalled that an early final decision on the appeals would be a better course than interim orders on sentence suspension. The same hearing also touched on difficulties in getting signed powers of attorney and access to medical reports from prison, issues that now seem to have boiled over into this latest adjournment request.
The appeals stem from convictions handed down by an accountability court in Islamabad on January 17, 2025, which sentenced Imran Khan to 14 years in prison and Bushra Bibi to seven years. Both challenged those convictions before the high court. Prosecutors say the case concerns alleged misuse of Rs50 billion that had been repatriated to Pakistan from the United Kingdom, along with land allegedly obtained from Bahria Town Ltd; the defence has denied wrongdoing.
There has been friction on the prosecution side too. In March, the IHC fined a National Accountability Bureau prosecutor Rs100,000 for what the bench described as delaying tactics during proceedings tied to the same matter. Around that time, defence lawyers were insisting they wanted the case heard promptly rather than put off again, which makes this week’s plea for adjournment feel less like a change of legal strategy and more like the consequence of an unresolved access problem between jailed clients and their counsel.
What happens on May 7 will matter well beyond courtroom scheduling. If the bench accepts the defence request, the case may slip further while lawyers seek formal authorisation and prison access. If it does not, the court will have to decide whether the appeals can proceed despite the defence saying, in effect, that it is not properly instructed to argue them. Either way, the hearing has turned into another test of whether this already delayed, politically charged case can finally move from procedural disputes to the actual merits.
