Any public trace of the corruption charges — leveled by one of the general’s own investigators — has disappeared.

“What happened to the prosecutors’ claim of evidence of his corruption and obstruction of justice?” asked Hossam Bahgat, one of the few Egyptian human rights advocates willing to publicly criticize General Tohamy. “Why was he ousted in that humiliating fashion? Why was he brought back from retirement the morning after the military takeover?” he continued. “There is zero public discussion of these very serious questions.”

General Tohamy declined to be interviewed for this article and did not answer written questions. No court has evaluated the allegations against him. His accuser, Lt. Col. Moatassem Fathi, a police officer, has also declined to be interviewed. In a television appearance last fall, he acknowledged that at one point he temporarily quit working for General Tohamy at the Administrative Oversight Authority, the main anticorruption watchdog. He was upset over a job transfer that he deemed punitive, and it could have left him with a grudge.

But critics of General Tohamy say he was the quintessential Mubarak man, the handpicked guardian of the system of corruption and impunity that was a central grievance of the revolution of January 2011. And his swift and silent return, the critics say, signals a restoration of the old order after the military takeover.

Yezid Sayigh, a researcher at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon, who has written about the Administrative Oversight Authority, asked: “Of all the qualified people in Egypt, why bring in Tohamy, who is way past his retirement age and under a cloud already? Why is this so urgent?”