Jemima caught up in sleaze trial
SOCIALITE heiress Jemima Goldsmith has courted a string of colourful suitors, including wayward fop Hugh Grant and pseudosocialist Russell Brand.
But her long-dissolved marriage to Pakistani cricketer- turnedpolitician Imran Khan is currently causing her the biggest headache.
Jemima (pictured in 1996 with her then- husband Imran) has become embroiled in corruption allegations against Khan, who is on trial for allegedly obtaining funds for his political party, PTI, through illegal means.
Khan has been forced to submit 40 years’ worth of bank statements to the Pakistan Supreme Court and has roped in Jemima, the mother of Khan’s sons Sulaiman, 20, and Qasim, 18, to rifle through her own belongings.
Goldsmith, 43, has had to track down 15-year-old bank statements to help prove Imran’s innocence.
Khan and Goldsmith claim the real villain is Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whose aide filed a petition against Khan in April, accusing him of concealing assets and offshore companies.
When Sharif resigned yesterday, after being disqualified from political office following a damning corruption probe into his family’s wealth, Goldsmith was quick to gloat. She said: ‘Good riddance to the man who tried to get me jailed when I was pregnant with my second child on trumped-up (nonbailable) charges of smuggling.’
Sharif’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz Sharif, was named last year among the Panama Papers — millions of leaked documents from law firm Mossack Fonseca that exposed the offshore assets of thousands of wealthy individuals and firms.
With her brothers, Hassan and Hussain, it emerged that Maryam Nawaz owned companies in the Virgin Islands and used them to buy luxury flats in Mayfair.
Despite Jemima’s public support for her former husband, whom she divorced in 2004 after nine years of marriage, there’s no hope of a romantic reconciliation.
In 2015, Goldsmith gave a teddy to her godson for his first birthday, and was told by the child’s mother the bear was a ‘transitional object’. Goldsmith replied: ‘My transitional object was Imran Khan.’