After hearing the petition, the court granted him interim bail till November 12 in this matter. As Dr Shahid came out of the courtroom after the hearing, a reporter of a private TV channel asked him why he escaped from the court when his bail was cancelled by the Special Judge Central, Islamabad.
The anchor became infuriated and snatched the mobile phone from the reporter and deleted the footage from it. Later, he gave the mobile phone back to the reporter on the intervention of lawyers.
Special Judge Kamran Basharat Mufti had turned down Dr Shahid's pre-arrest bail on October 25. After this verdict, the FIA made efforts for Masood's arrest but his counsel filed the petition before the IHC seeking his pre-arrest bail in the case related to alleged embezzlement in Pakistan Television (PTV) during his stint as the state-run PTV's managing director and chairman.
The petitioner is allegedly involved in embezzlement of Rs37 million while acquiring the Pakistan Cricket Board's (PCB) media rights in 2008 for which an agreement was signed with a fake company, namely M/S ISS. The investigators in the case claimed that the amount had been released and it caused a loss of millions of dollars to PTV as the state-run television had failed to acquire the PCB's media rights from 2008 to 2013.
According to the prosecution, Dr Shahid had allegedly signed an agreement with a fake company to negotiate with the PCB for grant of rights to PTV for coverage of matches played in Pakistan. It said that because of the agreement, the PTV had to face heavy financial losses.
In the petition seeking pre-arrest bail, the petitioner adopted that he was not nominated in the first information report (FIR) registered in this case. He added if he was arrested, he would suffer an irreparable loss to his repute and health and requested the court to grant him bail till adjudication of the complaint filed against him by the FIA before the special judge central.