France’s top administrative court on Wednesday upheld the conviction of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s uncle, Rifaat al-Assad, in a case of “ill-gotten gains” over assets estimated at 90 million euros ($89 million).

Rifaat al-Assad, 85, is the younger brother of Bashar’s father and former Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad, and served as vice president himself but fled the country in 1984 after a failed coup.

He had made a final appeal to France’s Court of Cassation after a lower court last year upheld his four-year sentence for conspiring to launder public funds in Syria between 1996 and 2016.

In the same ruling, he was convicted of concealing serious tax fraud and off-the-book hiring of servants, with authorities confiscating a whole range of his assets.

Rifaat, who has not attended hearings due to ill health, insists his property empire, which spans Spain, France and Britain, came from gifts from Saudi Crown Prince and future King Abdullah, who died in 2015.

The case is the second in France under a law passed last year targeting fortunes fraudulently amassed by foreign leaders.

Teodorin Obiang, the eldest son of the President of Equatorial Guinea, had confirmed his sentence to a three-year suspended sentence and a fine of 30 million euros on appeal last year.

In Syria, Rifaat al-Assad was the head of the elite Defense Brigades, internal security forces that violently crushed an Islamist uprising in the city of Hama in 1982.

After a three-decade absence following his failed attempt to seize power, pro-government media reported that he returned to Syria last fall.

In 1984 he fled first to Switzerland and then to France, where in 1986 he was awarded the Legion of Honour, the country’s highest award, for “merits”.

French investigators launched an investigation into his property in 2014 after complaints from watchdogs Transparency International and Sherpa.

They confiscated two Parisian townhouses, dozens of apartments in fashionable neighborhoods of the French capital and office space.

Since then, around 80 of his former employees, who live in an estate outside of Paris, have been largely without water and electricity as nobody pays the bills.

While Rifaat’s age and poor health make it unlikely he will ever serve a prison sentence in France, Wednesday’s verdict confirms the confiscation of the properties forever.

This could make Syria one of the first countries to potentially benefit from a scheme to return funds recovered under the Illicit Profits Act.

“The confiscation … is the first necessary condition to be able to plan the return of the ill-gotten gains,” said Patrick Lefas, head of Transparency International France, in a statement welcoming the court ruling.

But he added that getting the resources to ordinary Syrians, rather than simply handing them back to the Assad regime — which Transparency says could be achieved with another French law passed last year — was crucial.

“Recovering ill-gotten gains requires guarantees, without which it would be naïve to hope to return them to the populations of their countries of origin,” Lefas said.

Rifaat al-Assad also faces a trial in Spain on far larger suspicions of 500 properties in ill-gotten gains, as well as prosecution in Switzerland for war crimes dating back to the 1980s.