Egyptian court sentences former anti-corruption chief Hisham Geneina to 5 years in prison

Egyptian judge Hisham Geneina, the former head of Egypt's Central Auditing Authority, the country's anti-corruption agency, talks during an interview with AFP in the capital Cairo, June 23, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

A military court in Egypt has sentenced Hisham Geneina, the former head of the Central Auditing Authority, to five years in prison for allegedly spreading false news that purportedly harmed the Egyptian Armed Forces and the African country’s domestic affairs.

“The verdict is five years, and we're doing the appeal (procedure) now,” Geneina’s lawyer, Ali Taha, said on Tuesday, minutes after the court in capital Cairo handed down the ruling.

Geneina, now 61, was the head of Egypt’s Administrative Control Authority until March 2016, when President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi decided to relieve him of his duties as a top auditor, accusing him of exaggerating the cost of corruption. At the time, Geneina had reported that corruption had cost the Arab country some $68 billion in four years.

Later on, he was sentenced to prison after the State Security Prosecution charged him of allegedly spreading false news and misleading information, but in December 2016 the jail sentence was suspended.

On January 27, Geneina was stabbed, beaten and seriously wounded by unknown assailants outside of his home in Cairo as he was on his way to the administrative court to attend an appeals court session over a case he had lodged to challenge a presidential decree that sacked him from his post in 2016.

On February 13, he was arrested after he claimed, in an interview with Huffington Post Arabic news website, that ex-military chief of staff General Sami Anan, who led a short-lived 2018 presidential campaign challenging Sisi in March elections, had access to documents that could confirm the implication of senior military officials in corruption acts and the killing of protestors during the 2011 revolution, which raised former President Mohamed Morsi to power.

Morsi, the country's first democratically-elected president, was ultimately ousted from power through a military coup led by Sisi, the then army chief, in 2013.  

Geneina was also a leading member of an opposition campaign led by Anan, who was detained and interrogated on January 23 on charges of committing forgery and other crimes linked to his candidacy.

Anan’s lawyer lambasted what Geneina claimed in the interview, made after Anan’s detention, as completely “unfounded” and “untrue.” Even Geneina’s defense team later said that the statements he made during the controversial interview were the result of a “nervous imbalance” caused by an injury he received in late January.

According to Geneina’s lawyer, Tuesday's sentence can be appealed before a military appeals court.