Former MK Omri Sharon sent to jail

The Jerusalem Supreme Court on Monday denied an appeal by former Knesset Member Omri Sharon, son of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, thus not overturning his 2006 conviction for falsifying corporate records and campaign financing offenses.

Sharon was ordered to start serving his seven-month prison sentences in one month's time and pay a NIS 300,000 (about $80,000) fine.

Sharon's appeal addresses the prison sentence alone – not the conviction per se; and was base on the Tel Aviv Districts Court's minority opinion, put of the record by Judge Zecharia Caspi, which stated jail time was not mandatory in his case, opting for a recommendation of six months of community service instead.

His conduct, said Caspi, especially the fact that he waived parliamentary immunity and resigned the Knesset, as well as the fact that he was the first – and so far only – MK to be tried for campaign financing offenses, should be taken into consideration as mitigating factors.

District Court judges Ze'ev Hammer and Yehudit Shitzer, however, disagreed, citing actual prison time should be imposed, since the evidence showed Sharon was acting out of personal interests for his father election in the 1999 Likud primaries. The affair, dubbed "the false associations affair" was first published by Yedioth Ahronoth in 2001.

Originally sentenced to nine months in prison, Sharon's sentence was somewhat commuted following Prime Minister Sharon's stroke in late 2005.