Cairo, September 29: Egypt’s information minister under the former dictator Hosni Mubarak has been sentenced to seven years in jail on charges of corruption.
Anas al-Fekky, who had been detained in February, was convicted during a trial at a court in the country’s capital, Cairo on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
The prosecution had charged him with squandering the public funds flowing into the state-run Radio and Television Union, which was presided over by the Information Ministry, alongside Osama al-Sheikh, the union’s former head.
The two had reportedly misused about USD 1.6 million by paying inflated prices for television soap operas.
The charges cost Al-Sheikh a five-year prison sentence.
The former minister is still accused of having withheld the state television of about USD 1.9 million, which private TV stations had been slated to pay for live broadcasts of the 2009-2010 domestic football season and the start of the 2010-2011 season.
The former minister was acquitted earlier this month of other corruption charges, including channeling about 36 million Egyptian pounds (around USD 6 million) from the government funds to boost the media campaign promoting Mubarak’s party’s electoral chances.
Popular outrage sparked a nationwide revolution in February, which ended three decades of rule by Mubarak’s regime.
——Agencies