A Pakistani court this week sentenced former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi to 17 years in prison after finding them guilty of retaining and selling state gifts.
This article was originally published on 5 December 2025 on The Brief at sebsauerborn.com.
Khan has maintained throughout that the charges are politically motivated — a view shared by his supporters and by a number of international observers who have noted the convenient timing of prosecutions that accelerated after his removal from office.
I want to use this as an opportunity to say something that makes people uncomfortable: the line between legitimate prosecution and political persecution is less clear than Western democracies like to believe, and the same institutional mechanisms that imprison inconvenient politicians in Pakistan exist, in different forms, in Europe and America.
The Khan Case
Khan was removed from office in a no-confidence vote in April 2022. He has consistently claimed this was engineered by the Pakistani military establishment with American support, citing his refusal to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The charges against him — retaining gifts received as head of state and selling them at a profit through third parties — are real charges against a real legal framework. Whether they would have been prosecuted with the same enthusiasm if Khan had remained politically compliant is a legitimate question that nobody in Pakistan's legal establishment appears eager to answer.
He was imprisoned in August 2023. There have been multiple cases, multiple convictions, multiple sentences. The pattern, to an outside observer, looks less like the routine operation of rule of law and more like a systematic effort to ensure that the country's most popular politician cannot contest an election.
That may be legal. It is not justice.
Why This Matters Beyond Pakistan
The reason I am writing about a Pakistani court case in a newsletter aimed at European entrepreneurs is this: the mechanisms used to neutralise political opponents are not unique to emerging economies.
In the United States, the use of legal processes as a political weapon — the phenomenon sometimes called lawfare — has become a bipartisan tool. The prosecution of Donald Trump on 91 federal and state charges, coordinated across multiple jurisdictions, many brought by prosecutors who had publicly committed to targeting him before any indictment was filed, raised genuine questions about the weaponisation of legal process. Whatever you think of Trump, the pattern was concerning.
In Europe, the treatment of Catalan independence leaders in Spain, prosecuted for organising a referendum under sedition charges, resulted in sentences of up to thirteen years for acts that many legal scholars argued did not meet the standard of violence required for that charge.
In Germany, the use of administrative and financial regulatory mechanisms to pressure inconvenient organisations — the freezing of accounts, the denial of non-profit status, the bureaucratic harassment of groups deemed politically problematic — has a long history that predates the current government.
None of these examples is equivalent to what is happening to Khan in Pakistan. But they exist on the same spectrum.
The Lesson for Entrepreneurs
For my clients, the practical lesson is not primarily political. It is structural.
A jurisdiction that uses its legal system as a political tool is a jurisdiction in which your assets and your freedom are only as secure as your relationship with the current political establishment.
That relationship can change. Governments change. Priorities change. What was politically acceptable last year can become legally actionable this year.
This is one of the reasons I consistently advise clients to structure their affairs across multiple jurisdictions, to ensure that their assets and their personal freedom are not entirely hostage to the goodwill of any single government.
It is not paranoia. It is what intelligent people do when they understand how power actually works.
Work with Sebastian
If you want your affairs structured in a way that is genuinely resilient to political and legal risk across jurisdictions, not just in the good times, this is a core part of what I do. Let's talk. Book a consultation.