A number of politicians and activists condemned the New Cairo Misdemeanours Court’s decision to uphold a one-year suspended prison sentence against Hisham Geneina. The former head of the Central Auditing Organisation (CAO) was charged with spreading false news over corruption in Egypt.
Gamal Eid, a human rights lawyer and executive director of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, was among the list of people that expressed their solidarity. Others included the politician Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, and former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahy.
In their statement they called Geneina an honest man who should not have been imprisoned.
In an interview published by the Al-Youm Al-Sabaa newspaper on 23 December 2015, Geneina said it was difficult to determine the cost of corruption in Egyptian institutions. “Yet, according to monitoring reports supervised by CAO members, we could say that corruption exceeded EGP 600bn in 2015,” he wrote.
President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi officially dismissed Geneina form his position in March.
