ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court (SC) clarified that SC Judge Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa has never met or talked to Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan in any private capacity throughout his life and has no personal acquaintance with him on Tuesday. The statement has come after the PTI Chief in a recent interview with a television channel stated that he had been requested by Justice Khosa to file a petition before the SC in connection with the Panama Papers scandal. “The twist given to some of the words used in the interview is, therefore, malicious and unfortunate,” the SC said. The allegation is absolutely unfounded and completely untrue. The interview itself refers to some observations made in the Courtroom during a judicial proceeding. The fact of the matter is that on November 1, 2016 many Constitution Petitions pertaining to the said scandal were fixed for hearing before a Larger Bench of the Supreme Court headed by the then Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali and Justice Khosa was also a part of that five-member Bench. When the hearing of the matter came to a close on that day Justice Khosa addressed the learned counsel for the parties and observed in open Court to the effect that now that the Court sitting at the apex of the dispute resolution mechanisms in the country had taken cognisance of the matter the parties would be well advised to “hold their horses” and to reconsider their positions regarding the call for lockdown of Islamabad planned for the next day which was likely to cause extreme hardship to the citizens at large. It appears that those observations were accorded due deference and the lockdown of Islamabad was called off. All the major television channels in the country had reported the said observations on the same day and all the major newspapers had reported those observations on the following day, i.e. November 2, 2016 and this is a matter of record and hundreds of people, including scores of politicians, journalists and media persons, attending the Court on that day may confirm that factual position. The relevant Constitution Petitions had been filed before the SC by different petitioners many months prior to November 1, 2016.