ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court (SC) on Saturday delisted the hearing of a case pertaining to the fake degree issue of National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Lahore Director General Shahzad Saleem.
The SC’s registrar’s office had earlier fixed the case for hearing on Nov 12 by a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Mian Saqib Nisar.
Further, the court withdrew its notices issued to the petitioner. The new date for the hearing of the case is yet to be announced by the registrar office.
The matter of Shahzad’s degree was brought up in the apex court last year during the hearing of a suo motu case on alleged illegal appointments within NAB. The petitioner had claimed that Shahzad’s master’s degree transcript from 2002 is in the Calibri font, which was not commercially available until five years later.
Following an internal probe, the corruption watchdog had deemed Shahzad’s degree genuine and cleared him of any wrongdoing.
In a related development on Saturday, NAB has said that an image of Saleem’s degree being circulated on the social media is “fake”.
The anti-graft body also shared images of what it said was Saleem’s real degree.
The degree was issued by Al-Khair University in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.
Meanwhile, the education department of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government directed district education officers to declare “degrees, certificates and diplomas” issued by the now defunct Al-Khair University as illegal. A notification issued by the department read that the degrees will not be “valid for the purpose of seeking employment in any of the government departments”.