Shahid Khaqan Abbasi

Shahid Khaqan Abbasi (born 27 December 1958) is a Pakistani politician and businessman who served as prime minister of Pakistan from August 2017 to May 2018. Trained as an electrical engineer, he entered politics in 1988 after the death of his father, held the Rawalpindi seat in the National Assembly across several terms, chaired Pakistan International Airlines, founded the airline Airblue, and served as minister for petroleum and natural resources from 2013 to 2017 before succeeding Nawaz Sharif as prime minister. He left the Pakistan Muslim League (N) in December 2023 and in 2024 founded a new party, Awaam Pakistan, which he chairs. ^{1 2}

He was born on 27 December 1958. The English article's text and infobox place his birth at Dewal village in Murree District, Punjab (the text citing Dawn), while Wikidata gives Karachi as his place of birth; the two are not reconciled in the sources. He attended Lawrence College in Murree, then the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1978, and George Washington University, where he gained a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1985. He then worked as an electrical engineer in the United States and on energy projects in Saudi Arabia. ^{1 2}

His political career began after the death of his father, Khaqan Abbasi, a former federal minister, in the Ojhri Camp disaster of 1988. Standing first as an independent and then for the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad and the Pakistan Muslim League (N), he was elected to the National Assembly from Rawalpindi repeatedly from 1988 onwards. After the PML-N victory of 1997 he was appointed chairman of Pakistan International Airlines, a post he held until the coup of October 1999. ¹

Out of parliament after the 2002 election, he founded the private airline Airblue in 2003 and served as its first chairman and later its chief operating officer. Re-elected in 2008, he served briefly as minister for commerce in the Gillani government before resigning when the PML-N left the coalition. After the 2013 election he became minister for petroleum and natural resources, where he championed liquefied natural gas imports — including a fifteen-year agreement with Qatar signed in February 2016, described as Pakistan's biggest commercial transaction — as the answer to the country's power crisis. ¹

When Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was disqualified in the Panama Papers case on 28 July 2017, Abbasi was chosen to succeed him and was elected prime minister by the National Assembly on 1 August 2017, defeating Naveed Qamar by 221 votes to 47. He formed a large cabinet, retained most of Sharif's ministers, appointed a full-time foreign minister, created a merged Ministry of Energy whose portfolio he kept himself, and continued his predecessor's policies until the government's term ended on 31 May 2018, when he handed over to a caretaker prime minister. BBC News noted that he was selected as the least controversial among the PML-N leaders and for his links with the military. ¹

The cases reported against him are recorded here as charges with their outcomes, as the article states them, not as settled guilt. Named with Nawaz Sharif in the 1999 plane-hijacking case, he spent two years in jail and was acquitted by the court in 2001; an accusation of corruption in the purchase of computers for PIA ended in acquittal in 2008. As petroleum minister he was accused in 2015 of issuing LNG contracts without proper bidding; the National Accountability Bureau closed the case in December 2016 after finding that the rules were followed and the bidding transparent. In June 2018 an election tribunal disqualified him for life from contesting elections over his nomination papers; the Lahore High Court suspended the order and allowed him to contest, he won a Lahore by-election in October 2018, and the appellate tribunal's later detailed verdict upheld the disqualification finding. He was arrested in the LNG case on 18 July 2019 and later granted bail. ¹

He was re-elected to the National Assembly from Lahore in October 2018 and remained a senior PML-N figure, serving as the party's senior vice president and as secretary-general of the Pakistan Democratic Movement coalition. On 16 December 2023 he decided to leave the PML-N, and in June 2024 he announced his new party, Awaam Pakistan, which he leads as chairman. ¹

No article names a religion or school for him. The English article — the only one that exists in the museum's three languages — has no religion field and no religion text; Wikidata's only religion claim is Islam in general. His faith is therefore recorded as unclassified. ^{1 2}

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