CAIRO: Former MP Hani Sorour was handed down a three-year jail sentence by the Cairo Criminal Court Thursday in the notorious defective blood bags case.
Helmi Salah Al-Din, general manager of blood affairs department at the Ministry of Health; Mohamed Wagdan, chairman of the technical center in Hidelina (Sorour’s factory which manufactures the blood bags); Nivan Sorour, Sorour’s sister and Hidelina board member, also received the same sentence.
The court, headed by Magdy Qonsowah, also sentenced three of the company’s employees; Wafaa Abdel Rahim, Ashraf Ishaq and Fathia Ahmed Abdel Rahim to six months in jail with labor.
They were all charged in absentia.
In April 2008, the Cairo Criminal Court pronounced Sorour and the others involved innocent of charges that he supplied defective blood bags to public hospitals. However, the Cairo Court of Appeals annulled this ruling the following November and ordered their retrial.
All seven charged were also ordered to pay a LE 3,695,000 fine and ordered Sorour, his sister, Salah Al-Din and Wagdan to pay the same amount to the state treasury.
Sorour is a member of the ruling National Democratic Party and was a former member of the People’s Assembly’s economic affairs committee. He was stripped of his parliamentary immunity in January 2007.
The proceedings began in mid-2007 after an employee at the health ministry, Soheir El Sharkawi, blew the whistle on 200,000 defective blood bags in the ministry’s storage infected with bacteria and fungi likely to cause cancer and hepatitis.
