April 11, 2007	Wednesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 22, 1428

JERUSALEM, April 10: Police questioned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Tuesday for four hours in an investigation into suspected corruption within Israel’s Tax Authority, a police spokesman said.

One of Olmert’s top aides has been arrested but police said the prime minister was not a suspect in the case.

A source in the prime minister’s office said Olmert provided police investigators who came to his Jerusalem residence with “testimony regarding his period as minister of finance”.

“Olmert gave testimony for four hours in the fraud investigation in the Tax Authority scandal,” national police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Police suspect influential businessmen paid bribes to secure the appointment of confidants to senior positions in the authority and then received tax breaks from the officials.

Olmert served as finance chief in 2005 when some of the appointments were made.

Olmert, leader of the centrist Kadima party, is under investigation in several other cases, involving the 2005 privatisation of Israel’s second-largest bank, Bank Leumi, and the terms of purchase of a Jerusalem apartment in 2004.

He has denied any wrongdoing in the cases which, along with last year’s inconclusive war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas, have sent his approval rating plunging to just 3 percent in recent opinion polls.

A government-appointed commission into the way Olmert’s cabinet and the Israeli military handled the 34-day conflict is due to publish an interim report later this month that could determine his political future.

—Reuters