Corporate drama has lit up trading WhatsApp groups as investors with an appetite for the satori scripts watch TRG.

The Resource Group’s founder, the tech unicorn Zia Chishti, just won a battle to regain company control in court in Pakistan. Here is a simplified version of the long arc of this story.

The rise of Zia Chishti

Zia Chishti made a lot of money by inventing clear plastic braces whilst he was studying at Stanford University. The braces branded as Invisalign were cleared for sale a year after he founded what became Align Technology in 1997. By 2001, the company’s value had risen to one billion dollars, which in start-up terms is the definition of a unicorn.

Zia sold his share, however, and left all of this behind to conquer new worlds. He settled on forming a private equity company known as The Resource Group Pakistan (TRGP) in 2003, of which he became the founding CEO. At the same time, he made an international version of the company, TRG International Limited (TRGIL). This structure was put together by Zia with some partners.

The board of directors of the two companies overlapped. Captain Chishti kept largely the same crew, for what was in effect the same ship. All was well and the captain was at the helm. At the time, TRGP was looking to provide call centre services to companies for a fraction of the price such services would otherwise cost if handled in-house.

After a few years of call centre service, Zia realised he could make it all even more efficient if he added artificial intelligence to the mix. So he wrote a software which did just that, and founded a Washington-based company called Afiniti, which owned the software in 2005. Afiniti was half owned by TRGP. By 2017, it went on to become Chishti’s second unicorn at $1.7 billion.

At this point, TRG Pakistan was operating as a holding company for TRG International so that assets could be held and disposed of internationally without Pakistani regulatory involvement and the proceeds could be handled internationally. This structure created a firewall between the money and the Pakistani government, a no-brainer, as 250 million people will readily attest to.

The trigger

All was well until about 2019, when an employee at Afiniti made allegations of violent sexual misconduct against Zia, all of which came out in 2021. It destroyed his reputation and forced him to resign from various boards, including those held in TRG.

The captain was no longer steering the ship. He had been disgraced. And so what was left for the crew to do but mutiny?

Among TRGI’s many deep pockets was one lined with about $175 million, from the sale of one of its companies called e-TeleQuote. Because TRG Pakistan owned 69 per cent of TRGI, that money was due in its proportionate shares to the former. It had been decided by Zia to send the millions of dollars towards TRG shareholders by way of redemption which included himself. This would have been around $120 million.

But the board sans Zia disagreed. There were six common directors at the time between TRG Pakistan and TRG International. There was enough of a crew to mutiny now that the captain was on the gangplank and the crocodiles waited with open jaws below.

The TRGI board decided that the funds would not be repatriated and asked the TRGP board, mostly themselves, what to do. As these crew mates made decisions among themselves by wearing different hats as different boards, it was decided that TRGP would not accept the offer of redemption from TRGI. Meanwhile, the individual double-hatted directors did accept the redemption from TRGI in their personal capacities as shareholders when they were offered it. What was good enough for them was clearly not good enough for the company and the shareholders they were representing.

The story would have ended here without much controversy other than a difference of approach. But the double-hatted boards went further.

Biting the hand that feeds

They decided on a “third option” as proposed by themselves to themselves. They decided to park the TRGP share of sale proceeds of e-TeleQuote into a special purpose vehicle called Greentree Holdings which was going to now be authorised to invest the money belonging to TRGP.

This creative accounting would have still passed the smell test, had it not led to what happened next. Greentree began to use TRGP money to buy shares.

Inception? Infinite loop? Wattay idea, Sirjee? Actually, it is none of the above and a much more boring condition known as the state of being illegal.

A company’s own money cannot be used to buy its own shares. To do so would in effect deprive shareholders from their lawful gains through the company, by that company using those profits to buy their shares from them instead. Simple? Yes. But not if you have a hundred million dollars to play with.

Dozens of lawsuits arose—of insider trading, shareholder abuse, beneficial interests, third party speculators. Taking advantage of the chaos, one suit would be pointed at to delay another, whilst the TRGI-Greentree-TRGP loop de loop continued to operate without general meetings or fresh director elections. It is this period between 2022 and today which Zia Chishti alleges wiped $2 billion off TRG’s market value.

In court

Zia’s own action against all of this finally went to the Sindh High Court, where a comprehensive judgement by Justice Adnaan Iqbal Chaudhry set to naught all the actions of Greentree and ordered the shared holding register to be updated, the moneys to be returned and elections to be held. This was announced on May 20, 2025.

But was this game over?

For normal folk it was. When there’s a hundred million dollars out there, however, that’s where the games actually begin.

Comeback kid

A unique consortium of lawyers was hired by the group against Zia to appeal to the Supreme Court. Between Greentree, TRGI and TRGP, the brains-to-brawn ratio of lawyers was perfection. Appeals were listed with unprecedented speed, and then after a stay order was obtained, the files disappeared.

Upon enquiry, it was determined that the files were stolen from a courier van while in transit between Karachi and Islamabad. They were the only theft from the van. These files were then reconstituted. Amidst all this, in other proceedings a bunch of lawyers assaulted Zia Chishti in the corridors of a courtroom. These value-added legal services don’t come cheap, and these were deeper pockets than any company jurisdiction case had ever seen in Pakistan.

In the end, after much conjecture, a hearing was conducted during which Muneer A Malik and Uzair Bhindari represented Zia Chishti. The groups opposed to him argued every technicality known to law and man: the limitations of company jurisdiction; the pendency of dozens of other actions; the structure of such judicial miscellaneous applications. Chishti’s lawyers argued the very simple case that it actually was: a usurper crew of board members is attempting to hide behind technicalities to use money owed to shareholders to deprive them of benefits that ought to accrue to them.

That is all this case was. Hidden under all the multi-faceted proceedings, beneath all the legal jargon and the magnificently billed hours was basically the same problem courts see in company jurisdiction a hundred times a day: a company being used as a fiefdom, to perpetuate personal interests ahead of the rights of its shareholders.

Amidst it all, there were numerous weigh-ins. And Zia Chishti weighed as much as the opponents did, so the fight had to be fair. It had to be within the courtroom and it had to be by the law.

So, finally, a short order was pronounced by the Supreme Court in May 2026 which dismissed all the appeals against the Adnan Chaudhry order, and extraordinarily directed the anti-Chishti group to pay his legal costs too.