LAHORE: Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has taunted Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) chairman, saying Imran Khan cannot come into power through backdoor despite all his efforts.

In a statement issued here on Wednesday, he alleged that since Gen Pervez Musharraf`s regime Imran Khan had always relied upon `artificial support`. He said the scenario would have been different if `the PTI chief had ever relied upon the democratic process and the people.

Shahbaz, who is now a days shuttling between Lahore and Islamabad to attend the ruling party`s consultations going on in the federal capital in the wake of JIT report in Panama case, said the nature had granted a unique opportunity to Imran Khan in Khyber Pal(htunl(hwa, but `he (Imran) has proved with his insignificant performance in all the sectors of life that public service is beyond the capacity of those whose politics totally depends on conspiracies, lies, accusations and abuses.

In a reference to the current anti-government move of the PTI, he said that this time all the expectations of Imran Khan were based upon such documents of the JIT report whose contents were `masterpiece of contradictions`, adding the report had become controversial even before being made public.

Shahbaz said Imran Khan had threatened to file a ref-erence against him in a court of law. `I`ll wait for this reference,` he challenged the PTI chairman, adding `I`m quite sure that Niazi Sahib will use the same excuses to avoid appearing before the court in this reference as he has used in previous court cases, setting the biggest record in the judicial history of Pakistan (of averting appearances in courts).

The chief minister said there was nothing new in the Imran Khan`s accusations against him. `He has already leveled many such baseless and false allegations and I have filed a lawsuit worth Rs10 billion against an earlier slanderous statement against me.