Egypt court upholds Mubarak three-year jail sentence

Egypt's top appeals court upheld on Saturday a three-year prison sentence for ousted President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons for corruption.

The former president and his two sons were appealing their convictions in the case known in the domestic media as the "presidential palaces case".

They were charged with embezzling 125 million Egyptian pounds ($16 million) of public funds originally allocated for the upkeep of presidential buildings.

They were fined that same amount and an extra 21 million pounds.

Mubarak was sentenced to three years in prison, and his sons four years each - reduced to three years after appeal.

The verdict is final and not subject to appeal.

However, both Gamal and Alaa Mubarak were set free in October 2015, after taking into account their time served in pre-trial detention.

Hossam Bahgat, one of Egypt's best investigative journalists and the founder of one of the country's most effective human rights organisations, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), commented on the verdict in a Facebook post.

"This is all thanks to one investigator in administrative control," he said.

"His name is Moatasem Fathy, and he was the one who uncovered and proved this case, challenging all his superiors and state bodies who tried their best to interfere and disturb the case at all times."

"Ironically, Mubarak is free, staying at a luxury suite in a military hospital, while his convicted sons were released after serving their time, and no one dared charge his wife, Suzan," he added.

Mubarak, 87, has served most of his jail time at a military hospital since his arrest in 2011, months after his ouster in popular uprising.

Charges against Mubarak, who ruled for three decades, were dropped in a separate trial in 2014 for ordering the deaths of protesters during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, in which he was toppled, after a judge ruled that the charges were "inadmissible" on a technicality.