Former Israeli legislator Omri Sharon, the
son of former premier Ariel Sharon, was released from prison Wednesday after
serving four months in jail.
Wearing jeans and a T-shirt and carrying his personal belongings in a sports
bag, Sharon was seen leaving Israel's Ma'asiyahu prison, in Ramle south-east of
Tel Aviv, and boarding a white jeep, which drove him away.
The early release comes after a parole committee decided Monday to commute by
one-third his prison sentence for good behaviour. He began serving his time in
late February.
He had been sentenced a year earlier for fraudulently raising millions of
Israeli shekels for his father's 1999 primaries campaign, when Sharon senior
ran for the leadership of his former, hardline Likud party.
Implementation of his sentence was delayed, however to allow him to spend time
with his father, who suffered a major stroke in January 2006 and remains
hospitalized in a coma.
Sharon junior, 43, had been a lawmaker both for the Likud and the centrist
Kadima party headed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and founded by his father.
His sentence, which also included a fine of some 300,000 shekels (now about
88,000 dollars), was part of a plea bargain, under which he admitted to
illegally raising some 6 million shekels (now almost 1.8 million dollars) -
more than seven times the 820,000 shekels allowed to be raised for primaries
under Israel's election law.
He had done so by setting up fake companies, which received payments for
non-existent consulting services, which in fact were donations, dpa reported.