Claim: Imran Khan has made a new “confession” claiming that he invested $3 million from Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital & Research Center (SKMT) funds into a private housing society project.
Fact: Imran Khan tweeted about the $3m investment back in April 2016.
On 22 January 2023, The News published an article by Sher Ali Khalti with the headline, “Another confession by Imran Khan: $3m for hospital invested in housing society”. The sub-heading claims that Imran Khan has admitted to investing funds meant for SKMT in a private housing project.
The article explains that this revelation was made during the hearing of a PKR 10 billion defamation case. This lawsuit was filed against defence minister Khwaja Asif. According to this article, Imran Khan claimed that the $3 million was invested back into SKMT with a PKR 60 differential in foreign currency exchange.
Following the publication of this report, there was an uproar on social media where several people tweeted a screenshot claiming that Imran Khan had shared the same information on his Twitter profile in 2016 and that it is misleading of The News to claim that this is a new revelation or confession.
Due to the virality of this disagreement, Soch Fact Check decided to verify whether Imran Khan had indeed shared this information before speaking about it at the hearing of the defamation lawsuit.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check conducted an advanced search on Twitter with the keywords “SKMT” “Endowment” “2015” and we found that Imran Khan had indeed published a tweet on 6 April 2016 saying “1. For everyone’s info $ 3 m of SKMT Endowment Fund that was invested abroad was received back by SKMT in full in July 2015.”
Shaukat Khanum’s official annual financial report of 2015, which is available on their website, defines Endowment Fund as “This is a restricted fund. The main objective of the fund is to generate income for the operating expenses of Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital & Research Centre.”
Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital & Research Center issued a public statement through its Twitter account and also published it on its website.
The statement says, “… In 2008, an amount of US $3 million was invested by the endowment fund in a real estate project in Oman. The investment allowed for an early exit with a 100% capital guarantee on the investment. In 2015, SKMT exercised its early exit option and the entire amount of US $3 million was duly recovered… It is relevant to mention that, although the investment did not generate a profit for the Trust in dollar terms, it certainly did in rupee terms, since the difference in exchange rate referred to in the article in question actually worked in favour of SKMT.”
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the 3-day period since 22 January 2023 to 24 January 2023 using the following search terms:
- “Imran Khan” “confession” “investment”
We found several posts on Facebook, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Conclusion: Imran Khan made no new revelations about SKMT Endowment Fund investments. He had already shared this information on Twitter in April 2016.
Correction: The date of Imran Khan’s tweet in the fifth paragraph was mistakenly written as 6 April 2023 in an earlier version of this article. This has been updated on 3 February 2023 to more accurately reflect the contents of the article. Our corrections policy is available here.