CAIRO, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's top court cancelled on Thursday the seven-year jail verdict against a former minister and ordered his retrial over corruption charges, official MENA news agency reported.
The Court of Cassation accepted the appeal presented by former Irrigation Minister Mohamed Nasr El-Din Allam against the seven-year sentence issued by a criminal court earlier in February.
Allam and fugitive businessman Ahmed Abdel-Salam Qura were convicted of selling vast areas of agricultural lands in Giza's Ayyat district for construction and wasting public funds of over 37 billion Egyptian pounds (2 billion U.S. dollars).
The case is part of a large-scale anti-corruption campaign launched by Egypt over the past few years that led to the arrest and imprisonment of several officials and senior employees and the retrieval of large amounts of money.
In April 2016, Egyptian former Minister of Agriculture Salah Helal and his deputy minister were sentenced to 10 years in prison over receiving bribes to grant state-owned land licenses to a prominent businessman. They both were fined a total of 1.5 million Egyptian pounds.
Likewise, former Supplies Minister Khaled Hanafy resigned in August 2016 amid sharp criticism over using millions of dollars allocated for subsidies to purchase wheat that existed only on papers; Egypt is the most populous Arab state and the world's largest wheat importer.
Hanafy was also accused of costing 7 million Egyptian pounds to stay at a luxurious hotel in Cairo since he took office in 2014, yet the minister denied the charges.
In December 2016, a court confirmed a three-year jail term against former Housing Minister Mohamed Ibrahim Suleiman and ordered him to refund over 255 million Egyptian pounds to the state over selling vast areas of state-owned lands in new cities to a real estate mogul below market prices.
