Prosecutor asks for up to 18 months in prison for Olmert
Ex-PM was found guilty in March of fraud, breach of trust in Talansky affair; conviction carries max sentence of 5 years
The prosecution in the corruption trial of former prime minister Ehud Olmert asked the Jerusalem District Court on Tuesday for a prison sentence of between eight and 18 months.
Olmert appeared in court for the Tuesday sentencing hearing over a month after the court convicted him on graft charges.
The conviction carries a maximum jail term of five years. Prosecutor Uri Korb has indicated in the past that the state would seek actual prison time for the former prime minister.
The defense brought character witnesses, including former security officials such as ex-Mossad chief — and a business partner of Olmert’s — Meir Dagan and Olmert’s adopted daughter to speak in the former prime mininster’s defense.
Korb acknowledged to the court that “people have many sides to them,” and that the defendant had “contributed much to society over the years,” but insisted that this was often true in white-collar crime cases.
The guilty verdict in the Talansky case came half a year after the Supreme Court ordered a retrial sought by prosecutors after they obtained new testimony from Olmert’s former assistant Shula Zaken, including recordings of conversations between Olmert and Zaken, who provided the information last spring as part of a plea bargain.
Overturning its earlier decision, the three-member court unanimously found the former premier guilty of fraud, breach of trust, and aggravated fraud.
Olmert has already been sentenced to six years in prison for his role in the Holyland real estate bribery scandal.
In 2012, the Jerusalem District Court acquitted Olmert on charges of fraud, tax evasion and falsifying corporate records in what became known as the Talansky and Rishon Tours affairs.
He was accused of accepting envelopes full of cash from American businessman and fundraiser Morris Talansky in exchange for favors.
The legal battle was focused on whether the funds were personal gifts or a political exchange.
In their verdict in March, the judges wrote that in light of Zaken’s diaries and recordings, which they ruled were reliable, “we change our conclusion.”
Judge Rivka Friedman-Feldman, one of the three judges on the panel, insisted that even without Zaken’s testimony, there had been sufficient evidence to convict Olmert for these crimes in the original trial.
Yet the audio recordings by Zaken buttressed the allegation that Olmert had accepted the “cash envelopes” from Talansky while mayor of Jerusalem, and failed to report the bank account in which the funds were held to the proper authorities. The court found that Olmert made personal use of the money, including paying tens of thousands of dollars to Zaken.
“There were no cash-filled envelopes,” Olmert had exulted on the day of his original acquittal. “The court has made this utterly clear.”
“Mr. Olmert did receive cash-filled envelopes,” prosecutor Korb had said on the day of Olmert’s conviction in March. He called the verdict the culmination of a Sisyphean struggle to thwart corruption. While the process had taken a long time, he said, “justice was finally done.”
At the time of his conviction, Olmert’s lawyers said they were “upset and disappointed with the verdict. The decision today was reached despite the blatant lies of Shula Zaken in court, and despite that the defense team clearly proved in the hearings that Zaken edited, deleted, and worked on the tapes in a manipulative way, and that the tapes are not reliable, to say the least,” a statement from Olmert’s legal team read.
Last May, Olmert was sentenced to six years in prison for accepting bribes in the real estate scam known as the “Holyland affair” and ordered to report to prison on September 1, but the prison date was delayed pending his appeal.
While beating most charges in 2012, Olmert was found guilty on the lesser charge of breach of trust in what was known as the Investment Center case, in which he was found to have granted personal favors to attorney Uri Messer when he served as trade minister.
Olmert was also cleared on accusations of paying for family vacations by double-billing diaspora Jewish organizations through the Rishon Tours travel agency.
The charges were filed after he became prime minister in 2006, but covered his time as mayor of Jerusalem and later as a government minister. He officially resigned as prime minister in September 2008 after police investigators recommended that he be indicted.
Zaken was convicted on two counts of fraudulently obtaining benefits and breach of trust in the Rishon Tours case. In the Holyland case, a judge accepted her plea bargain and sentenced her to 11 months in prison for accepting bribes.
At the end of the Holyland hearings, she came forward with the recordings in exchange for a lighter sentence. The recordings also showed Olmert offering Zaken hush money and contained evidence of tampering with evidence in the case, prosecutors said.
JTA contributed to this report.
