The Sindh High Court has officially acquitted the former president of the National Bank of Pakistan, Syed Ahmed Iqbal Ashraf, in connection with the high-profile fifty-four billion rupee Hascol Petroleum Limited loan scandal. In a detailed ruling, the division bench highlighted major inconsistencies in how the state legal machinery handled the multi-billion rupee corporate fraud investigation. The court pointed out that the structural integrity of the initial prosecution had fundamentally dissolved, as virtually every other high-profile individual originally implicated in the banking scam had already been systematically exonerated, judicially acquitted, or strategically converted into state witnesses by investigators.
A two-judge bench, presided over by Justice Omar Sial, took severe notice of the arbitrary prosecutorial methodologies deployed throughout the long-standing case. The justices observed that several senior executives and credit officers from the National Bank of Pakistan, who were originally booked under identical criminal allegations of financial misconduct and regulatory non-compliance, were mysteriously removed from the primary list of the accused and turned into prosecution witnesses. This structural shift in the legal layout of the case left the former bank president isolated in the litigation, despite the institutional credit approval processes involving multiple layers of corporate management and risk-assessment committees.
The roots of the legal battle trace back to an extensive investigation by the Federal Investigation Agency, which had formally booked and charge-sheeted more than twenty high-ranking officials representing the National Bank of Pakistan, Hascol Petroleum Company Limited, and global energy trader Vitol. The state investigators alleged that the commercial bank management had deliberately extended highly imprudent, unsecured, and non-compliant financing facilities to Hascol between the fiscal years of 2015 and 2020. This aggressive credit exposure ultimately culminated in catastrophic defaults, causing an estimated aggregate loss of fifty-four billion rupees to the public-sector banking institution and triggering a massive macroeconomic review of corporate lending guidelines.
Ashraf was forced to approach the provincial high court for judicial relief after a specialized banking court summarily dismissed his initial acquittal application in April 2025. Following an exhaustive review of the corporate transaction records, institutional credit approvals, and extensive oral arguments presented by both defense counsels and state prosecutors, the Sindh High Court determined that the criminal charges against the former president could no longer be sustained under the law, thereby accepting his constitutional application and ordering his immediate exoneration.
According to the official judicial order, the corporate background of the case indicates that Vitol Dubai Limited initially acquired a substantial twenty-five percent equity stake in Hascol Petroleum in 2016 by purchasing shares directly from company insiders Mumtaz Hasan Khan, Saleem Butt, and Liaquat Ali, with Salman Butt acting as the chief executive officer during that operational window. Hascol was originally established as a private limited entity back in 2001 before transitioning into a publicly traded corporate body in 2007. The Federal Investigation Agency asserted that during Ashraf presidential tenure at the bank from 2014 to 2016, the financial institution expanded its initial credit lines to Hascol by five billion rupees, an exposure that ballooned to fifteen point sixty-five billion rupees under the subsequent presidency of Saeed Ahmed Khan from 2017 to 2019.
The high court observed that while the state agency originally accused both former bank presidents, internal credit committee executives like Rima Ather and Syed Irtiza Kazmi, and Hascol board members including Saleem Butt and Ali Ansari of collusive fraud, the state prosecution subsequently dismantled its own narrative. The bench pointed out that Saleem Butt, whom the state had labeled as the central mastermind of the entire financial enterprise, was completely acquitted of all charges. Furthermore, former president Saeed Ahmed Khan and senior executive Usman Shahid were entirely exonerated via supplementary agency reports, while multiple other key targets were transformed into witnesses without any rational or transparent justification, leaving no lawful ground to deny the same relief to the applicant.
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