Egypt court reduces Mubarak-era minister’s fine for theft to $29

An Egyptian court fined a former interior minister, who served under ousted president Hosni Mubarak, 500 Egyptian pounds ($29) for “abusing pubic funds”, cancelling a previous decree to fine him and two other defendants the equivalent of $22 million.

Habib Al-Adly served as interior minister until the 2011 uprising which ousted the cabinet and the president.

The court sentenced Nabil Khalaf, a senior Interior Ministry officer, to three years in prison and ordered him to return 62 million Egyptian pounds ($3.6 million) to the authorities and pay the same amount in fines. The court also ordered that Khalaf be sacked from his post at the ministry.

In 2017, the Cairo Criminal Court sentenced Al-Adly and two other defendants to seven years in prison on an embezzlement charge and ordered that the three return 195 million Egyptian pounds ($15 million) and pay the same sum in fines. But the top appeals court in Egypt, the Court of Cassation, overturned the ruling in 2018 and ordered a retrial.

READ: Egypt human rights record worse now than under Mubarak

Since the 2013 bloody military coup that ousted the country’s first democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi and led to the rise of his defence minister, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, to the presidency in 2014, Egyptian authorities have launched an unprecedented crackdown on opponents and dissidents.

However, during that time, members of Mubarak-era government, including the longtime dictator himself, have been released from jail.