Shahid Khaqan Abbasi

Shahid Khaqan Abbasi is a Pakistani politician and businessman who served as the 18th Prime Minister of Pakistan from August 2017 to May 2018. Born on 27 December 1958 in Karachi, he hails from a political family of Murree, and studied engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Political career

Abbasi began his political career with the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad in the late 1980s and was first elected to the National Assembly in 1988 from his family's seat in Murree. A long-time loyalist of Nawaz Sharif, he held several ministerial portfolios, most notably as Minister of Petroleum and Natural Resources (2013-2017), where he oversaw the energy sector and the LNG import programme.

He became Prime Minister in August 2017 after Nawaz Sharif's disqualification, and served until the 2018 elections, when his interim period handed over to Imran Khan's government. He was arrested in 2018 over the LNG terminal corruption case, in which he was acquitted in 2021.

Legacy

Abbasi is regarded as a technocratic, business-friendly politician within the PML-N, and he has remained a senior party figure, occasionally at odds with the party leadership over internal matters. He continues to represent his Murree constituency in the National Assembly.