PML-N President Shehbaz Sharif has filed a defamation case in the London High Court against UK journalist David Rose and Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) – publishers of the Mail Online and Mail on Sunday for carrying “utterly false allegations” against him.

According to a report in The News, Shehbaz’s lawyers, Alasdair Pepper and Antonia Foster shared the details of the defamation suit in a press conference at their office. The former chief minister of Punjab was also present.

Pepper revealed that the defamation claim has been filed at the London High Court’s Queen’s Bench Division against the defendants DMGT and David Rose, author of the story. The case will go to a trial before a judge at the Royal Court of Justice in under a year as the minimum time to get a trial date is between nine months to a year.

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The lawyer elaborated they decided to approach the court after failing to get a substantive response from the newspaper in several months, despite repeated requests.

He said that the article, which alleged that Sharif misappropriated UK taxpayers’ money in the form of DFID aid intended for the victims of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, and the author’s “social media campaign” was “gravely defamatory” of Sharif.

He asserted that DFID denied the allegations and labelled the claims as false proving that their client was not involved. The lawyer added that the article was part of a “politically motivated campaign” against the PML-N leader and that Sharif is renowned for his professional and personal ethics.

In a statement, a DFID spokesperson had said, “The UK’s financial support to ERRA over this period was for payment by results – which means we only gave money once the agreed work, which was primarily focused on building schools, was completed, and the work audited and verified.”

Speaking at the press conference, Shehbaz said that he was determined to prove that the allegations against him were false, baseless and politically motivated to malign him, adding that it was clear that Rose was used by the PTI government as they granted him “exclusive access to some of the tempered results of a high-level probe ordered by Khan” including a “confidential investigation report” and unusual access to interview “key witnesses” held on remand in jail.

The Daily Mail UK report, published on July 14, 2019, claimed that the paper was given exclusive access to some of the results of a high-level probe ordered by the government of Pakistan and it was also able to interview key witnesses held on remand.

One of the witnesses had claimed that he laundered millions on behalf of Shehbaz’s family from a nondescript office in Birmingham without attracting suspicion from Britain’s financial regulators.

The paper had also alleged that Shehbaz and his family were embezzling tens of millions of pounds of public money and laundering it in Britain.

Shehbaz had served a first legal notice to the newspaper on July 26, alleging that David Rose’s report was “politically motivated”.

Despite this, Rose had on multiple occasions thrown shade at Sharif for taking no action.