PROFILE: The rise and fall of former Israeli premier Ehud Olmert

Sep 25, 2009, 11:34 GMT

Tel Aviv - Former premier Ehud Olmert, who first made his name in Israeli politics as a young legislator fighting organized crime, is ironically - more than three decades on - going down in history as the first former Israeli premier ever to stand trial.

The criminal trial opened Friday in a Jerusalem court, where Olmert, who turns 64 next week, was indicted on charges including fraud, breach of trust and tax evasion for accepting envelopes of cash from overseas Jewish donors and for multiple-billing travel expenses.

Born in northern Israel to Jewish World War II refugees from Russia and the Ukraine, Olmert, whose father was a legislator for Heirut, the precursor of the hardline Likud party of current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, got involved in politics at a very young age. When he first entered the Knesset in late 1973, aged 28, he was the youngest member ever elected into the Israeli parliament.

Gaining prominence also as a lawyer, he was in his early 40s when he first became a minister in 1988 under the then Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir.

From 1993, he would serve for one decade as mayor of Jerusalem, as a nationalist who helped the city's Jewish areas expand north and southward into occupied West Bank land with controversial new neighbourhoods such as Har Homa and Pisgat Zeev.

He returned to the Knesset, and cabinet, in 2003 as part of the Likud government of former premier Ariel Sharon, who appointed him trade and industry minister.

Starting out as hawks, both men underwent an identical pragmatic evolution, and Olmert became one of the strongest supporters in an otherwise rebellious Likud of Sharon's 2005 unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip. He was with Sharon later that year in abandoning the Likud and forming the new, centrist Kadima party.

When, less than three months before the 2006 Israeli elections, Sharon suffered a stroke that has left him in a coma to this day, Olmert was his natural successor.

Kadima under Olmert won, but his premiership was marked by little grace and even less luck. He had barely warmed the prime minister's seat when the 2006 second Lebanon war erupted, and he would spend most of the rest of his term as, in his own words, an 'unpopular' premier trying to prove he was implementing the lessons of a military campaign that many Israelis regarded as unsuccessful and chaotic.

While also starting, initially secret, indirect peace talks with Syria shortly after that war, he revived - at a November 2007 summit in the US town of Annapolis, Maryland - long-stalled negotiations with the Palestinians, accepting for the first time a clear, ambitious deadline of one year.

His aides would later say he offered the Palestinians more than any previous Israeli prime minister - some 93 per cent of the West Bank, a one-on-one territorial exchange for the remaining 7 per cent, and 'far-reaching' concessions regarding East Jerusalem.

But the intensive negotiations were cut short by the corruption allegations, which surfaced in their midst in the spring of 2008 and prompted him to step down that autumn.

Israel was forced into early elections, which pushed Kadima into the opposition, and saw the Likud, under Netanyahu, return to power.

Personally known as a man who enjoys the finer things in life, his artist wife is thought to be considerably more left-wing then he. Of his five adult children, one daughter is a gay activist, and another is active in Mahsom Watch, an Israeli group monitoring the conduct of soldiers at military road blocks in the West Bank.

Olmert, who would often jog to keep fit, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in late 2007.

When he resigned from the Knesset last year he was the longest-serving lawmaker in the parliament.

He has denied the charges against him.