CAIRO: Parliament Speaker Ahmed Fathi Sorour on Wednesday announced the expulsion of National Democratic Party MP Hani Sorour's from the People's Assembly, following a majority no-confidence vote. Hani Sorour was sentenced in absentia last November to three years in prison by the Cairo Criminal Court for the manufacture and distribution of defective blood bags he supplied to public hospitals. He was also ordered to pay the court a LE 3,695,000 fine as well as to repay the same amount to the state treasury. The PA's constitutional and legislative committee concluded in its report about the case that the verdict disqualifies Sorour from parliamentary membership. During the Wednesday session, based on this report, 314 MPs voted by name in favor of expelling Sorour, who wasn't present, despite being notified to attend according to parliament bylaws. The court proceedings against Sorour began in mid-2007 when an employee at the health ministry, Soheir El-Sharkawi, blew the whistle on 200,000 defective blood bags in the ministry's storage infected with bacteria and fungi likely to cause cancer and hepatitis. As it transpired, Hidelina, the factory owned by Hani Sorour, was the manufacturer of these bags. In April 2008 the Cairo Criminal Court pronounced Sorour and six others involved innocent of charges that he supplied defective blood bags to public hospitals. However, the Cairo Court of Appeals annulled this ruling the following November and ordered their retrial. Sorour was stripped of his parliamentary immunity in January 2007. MPs applauded the PA's recent decision to expel the convicted MP. "This is a sound decision which the majority of us has voted for, said MP Heidar Al-Boghdadi, who added that it proves that members from the ruling NDP do not enjoy special status.
