CAIRO: A court in Egypt Thursday rejected an appeal by the former anti-corruption watchdog chief against a prison sentence he received for spreading false news, but it suspended the sentence.

President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi sacked Hisham Geneina, head of the Central Auditing Organization, in March and appointed a fact-finding commission that concluded Geneina had misled the public by overestimating the scale of corruption. Geneina had said that corruption had cost Egypt 600 billion Egyptian pounds ($31.25 billion) in four years.

A court found Geneina guilty in July and sentenced him to a year in prison and a fine of 20,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,000).

He appealed the decision.

The court Thursday confirmed Geneina’s sentence, but suspended it for three years. It also confirmed his fine. He has the option of further appeals.

Geneina told Reuters in June he had done nothing wrong and his case was being used to discourage others from speaking out in a country that he said was increasingly in the grip of security agencies.

Sisi has made fighting graft a priority for his government as it struggles to rebuild an economy battered by political turmoil since the 2011 uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

Pro-government media accused Geneina of being an Islamist because he had been appointed by Sisi’s predecessor, Mohammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

As military chief, Sisi ousted Morsi in 2013 after mass protests against his rule, outlawing the group and declaring it a terrorist organization. He went on to win a presidential election in 2014 and launched a fierce crackdown on dissent, drawing widespread allegations of abuse by human rights groups. The government denies all the allegations.