In a Supreme Court hearing on 26th August related to shareholder disputes at PSX-listed TRG Pakistan, a three-member bench of the court ordered that the case be tagged together with an earlier ongoing appeal by certain company directors against criminal defamation proceedings brought in a Sindh lower court by the company’s former CEO Zia Chishti.
The hearing was heard by a bench headed by Justice Hassan Azhar Rizvi that included Justice Naeem Akhtar Afghan and Justice Miangul Hasan Aurangzeb.
At the start of the hearing, Justice Afghan inquired whether the respondent in the shareholding matter, Zia Chishti, was the same person who had been found liable for sexual misconduct in the United States and had to leave the company.
He recalled that in another ongoing matter he had previously heard, Chishti had, after departing the company due to a sexual harassment and assault finding, dragged non-resident foreign directors of the company into defamation cases in Pakistan and had lower courts in Sindh issue summons for their personal appearance. He lamented the impact this situation had on the image of Pakistan.
Upon confirmation by the lawyers that both matters involved the same person, Justice Afghan asked Chishti, who was present in court, to step forward and approach the rostrum.
He then ordered that the shareholder dispute proceeding be clubbed with the defamation matter, as it would help in determining whether Chishti’s intent was mala fide.
Justice Afghan observed that there had been an attempt to prevent this particular Supreme Court hearing from proceeding, as the case files had been stolen while being transported and had to be refiled by the complainants.
Meanwhile, Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb asked the parties to provide details of shareholdings within each legal entity in the corporate structure, and requested that the information reflect the pro-forma shareholding subsequent to any enforcement action against Chishti from an arbitration in the United States, which Chishti recently lost and was ordered to pay $9.1 million.
The Supreme Court hearing was being held as an appeal against a Sindh High Court ruling issued in June 2025 in favour of Chishti, which cancelled the shares of TRG Pakistan’s largest shareholder Bermuda-based Greentree Holdings (GTH), prevented GTH from completing a tender bringing in approximately $55 million into the country in addition to the $90 million already invested by GTH, and had ordered immediate elections.
The Supreme Court had issued a status quo order in late June 2025 when the appeal filed by GTH was first heard.
The defamation matter involving the company’s directors that has been clubbed with the shareholder dispute is related to criminal defamation proceedings brought forward by Chishti and the Jahangir Siddiqui Group in 2023 in Sindh lower courts in Karachi and Hyderabad, alleging defamation from court filings made by various TRG entities in civil litigation in the Sindh High Court.
These proceedings had been suspended by the Sindh High Court in 2023, but remanded back by the SHC to the lower court in 2024 upon which the directors had appealed to the Supreme Court to dismiss what they had alleged to be frivolous and bogus defamation claims.
The Supreme Court had then, in early 2025, suspended those lower court defamation proceedings against TRG directors.
The bench has adjourned the hearing for three weeks.
