In a plea bargain, the former Israeli prime minister pled guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice for trying to buy the silence of his chief aide.
Advertisement
The Talansky case consisted of Olmert illegally receiving, using and concealing at least $153,950 in envelopes from NY businessman Morris Talansky between 1993 and 2002. According to terms of the present deal, he will serve a six-month sentence received for one charge concurrently with the 18-months he’ll be serving for another corruption case.
The deal represented the first admission of wrongdoing by the former minister and Jerusalem mayor, who has consistently maintained his innocence in over eight years of legal proceedings in various graft cases. Ten other officials and contractors were also convicted in the affair.
The Jerusalem Magistrates Court’s ruling came after Olmert pleaded guilty to pressuring a confidant to not testify against him in several cases of bribery and corruption.
Olmert is the first Israeli prime minister to be sentenced to jail time.
The Jerusalem Magistrates Court on Tuesday said he would report to jail the same day his prior sentencing would begin, adding that time served for his obstruction of justice conviction would run parallel to that of his bribery conviction, effectively allowing him to serve both sentences at the same time.
Discussions were being held with the aim of agreeing to a set amount of prison time he would serve for all the remaining cases, so as to save him and the prosecution time on further trials and appeals to the Supreme Court and globally reduce his prison time. But in December, the Supreme Court reduced his sentence to 18 months in prison and acquitted him of one of the charges.
Advertisement
Olmert, originally a member of the right-wing Likud party, now headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, joined the center-left Kadima party, led by Ariel Sharon, in 2005.
