Egypt's Court of Cassation rejected on Tuesday a prosecution appeal against the acquittal of former interior minister Habib El-Adly on charges of illicit gains.

The public prosecution had appealed against a 2019 criminal court verdict that acquitted Mubarak’s longest-serving interior minister, and eight others, on charges of of illicit gains during his time at the ministry of interior.

That earlier verdict saw them instead fined EGP 500 each for charges of negligence and unintentional damage.

The Court of Cassation did not accept the defendants’ appeals against the fine.

El-Adly and his co-defendants were originally accused by the prosecution of embezzling interior ministry funds amounting to EGP 2.38 billion. In 2017, he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison, but the Court of Cassation accepted the defendants’ appeal in 2018 and ordered a retrial.

El-Adly served as minister from 1997 until president Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011.

After the revolution he was charged with the murder of protesters and the cutting off of telecommunications, but he was acquitted in all of the cases except the illicit gains case and another known in the local media as “the conscript enslavement case.”

He was sentenced to three years in prison in 2013 for charges related to that case, a verdict and sentence which was upheld by the Court of Cassation in 2014.