Former Egyptian Interior Minister Habib al-Adli returned to prison to serve a sentence set by the criminal court in April, for his involvement in financial and administrative corruption cases, after escaping for eight months from the seven-year prison sentence.
According to the verdict, Adli was ordered to refund 195 million Egyptian pounds to the State and was fined with the same amount.
A brief statement issued by the interior ministry said that Adli, who had served for 14 years as interior minister, was arrested after determining his location.
The official account maintained that the arrest of Adli was “based on information on his location,” while his lawyer Farid al-Deeb insisted that his client has “surrendered” to the police.
Adli, who has denied the charges, is due back before the Court of Cassation, Egypt’s top civil court, for an appeal on January 11.
Since the outbreak of the January 25, 2011 revolution, Adli and a number of officials in former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime have been in pretrial detention.
In March 2015, the former interior minister was released and acquitted of all the charges against him, except for a case known as “forced labor”, in which he was convicted of exploiting the police in special work outside the limits of their responsibilities.
The verdict against Adli was one of the reasons for the Egyptian Public Prosecution’s statement, in which it criticized its Swiss counterpart for refusing to return the money of Mubarak regime’s officials in its banks.
In a statement issued earlier this month, the Egyptian public prosecutor said that Adli was found guilty in cases of financial corruption, stressing that in view of his conviction “it is clear that the Swiss side is trying to evade the application of Swiss law on the Egyptian case, under the alleged failure of legal aid.”
