Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert is to go to prison in February for his role in a bribery scandal after the country’s supreme court reduced his sentence from six years to 18 months.
The court partially accepted his appeal and cleared the ex-premier of the main bribery charge but upheld part of his conviction for taking a lesser bribe.
When Olmert enters jail on 15 February he will become the first Israeli leader to be behind bars.
Olmert, 70, was convicted in March 2014 and sentenced to six years in a wide-ranging case in which he was accused of accepting bribes to promote a controversial real-estate project in Jerusalem. He was charged for acts that happened while he was mayor of Jerusalem and the country’s trade minister, years before he became prime minister in 2006.
Olmert has denied any wrongdoing and was allowed to stay out of prison until the verdict on his appeal was delivered.
After Tuesday’s verdict, Olmert said he was satisfied with his partial exoneration. He added it was still a hard day but he said he accepted the court’s ruling.
“A stone has been lifted from my heart,” he said. “I said in the past I was never offered and I never took a bribe. And I say that again today.”
The ruling marks a dramatic climax for a man who only years earlier led the country and hoped to bring about a historic peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Olmert was a longtime fixture on the right of Israeli politics when he began taking a more moderate line toward the Palestinians while deputy prime minister a decade ago. He played a leading role in Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
He became prime minister in January 2006 after the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, had a stroke. He subsequently led the newly formed Kadima party to victory in parliamentary elections on a platform of pushing further peace moves with the Palestinians.
He led his government to the Annapolis peace conference in November 2007 – launching more than a year of ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful peace talks with the Palestinians.
Olmert has said he made unprecedented concessions to the Palestinians during those talks and was close to reaching an agreement at the time of his resignation, though the Palestinians have said his assessment was overly optimistic.
His departure in 2009 cleared the way for the election of hardliner Binyamin Netanyahu.
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