An Israeli court on Tuesday sentenced former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to six years in prison, six weeks after convicting him on two counts of bribe-taking when he served as mayor of Jerusalem.
He was also handed a fine of some $600,000.
Olmert, 68, has become the first former premier in Israel to have been indicted, convicted, and sent to jail.
“Olmer abused his senior position as a public interest to promote his interests and received huge sums,” said Tel Aviv District Court Judge David Rosen, reading from his 50-page sentencing statement.
On March 31, 2014 after a two-year trial, the court found Olmert and a dozen high-profile defendants guilty of smoothing over legal and zoning restrictions for a construction project, Holyland, in south-western Jerusalem in return for money.
In a statement issued ahead of the sentence, Olmert’s defence and PR team denied any wrongdoing and said they would appeal to the Supreme Court. “This is a sad day in which a severe and unjust sentence is expected to be handed to an innocent man,” said the statement.
The judges handed jail sentences of three to seven years on other high-ranking officials and businessmen convicted in the Holyland affair, one of Israel’s worst corruption cases.
The most severe sentence was handed to the Jerusalem municipality chief engineer from 2000-2005, Uri Shitrit, who received seven years in jail for accepting bribes. In the case of Olmert, the court had said in its verdict that two counts of indirect bribe-taking had not passed the statute of limitations and were sufficiently proven. One involves some $140,000 given to his brother by a businessman who was a state witness. The second count involves $17,000 given to aids.
Olmert has denied he ever accepted bribes, directly or indirectly, insisting he did not know his brother had accepted the money. But Judge Rosen said he found that version of events unreasonable.
Olmert, who was premier from 2006 until 2009, was convicted of accepting the bribes during his terms as mayor of Jerusalem between 1993 and 2003 and as trade and industry minister, between 2003 and 2006.
The allegations forced him to resign as prime minister, at the height of far-reaching peace negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
In July 2012 he was partially acquitted by a Jerusalem court in another corruption trial that lasted some three years. This week, he was questioned by police on suspicion of obstructing justice, after his former secretary, who had backed him for years, turned against him to become state witness.
